国际电影影片词典（英文版）：1-4

915 P PAISà (Paisan) Italy, 1946 Director: Roberto Rossellini Production: Organization Films International in collaboration with Foreign Films Productions, some sources also credit Capitani Films; black and white, 35mm; running time: 117 minutes, originally 124 minutes; length: 4195 feet. Released 1946. Producers: Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger, and Mario Conti; production supervisor: Ugo Lombardi; story: Victor Haines, Marcello Pagiero, Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Klaus Mann (Florence episode), and Vasco Pratolini; screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini; English dialogue: Annelena Limentani; English subtitles: Herman G. Weinberg; as- sistant directors: Federico Fellini, Massimo Mida, E. Handimar, and L. Limentani; photography: Otello Martelli; editor: Eraldo da Roma; sound: Ovidia del Grande; music: Renzo Rossellini; English narrators: Stuart Legg and Raymond Spottiswoode. Cast: Carmela Sazio (Carmela); Robert Van Loon (Joe from Jersey); Alfonsino Pasca (Boy); Maria Michi (Francesca); Renzo Avanzo (Massimo); Harriet White (Harriet); Dots M. Johnson (MP); Bill Tubbs (Captain Bill Martin); Benjamin Emmanuel; Raymond Camp- bell; Albert Heinz; Harold Wagner; Merlin Berth; Leonard Parrish; Dale Edmonds (Dale); Carlo Piscane (Peasant in Sicily story); Mats Carlson (Soldier in Sicily story); Gar Moore (Fred); Gigi Gori (Partisan); Cigolani (Cigolani); Lorena Berg (Maddalena); Allen Dan; M. Hugo; Anthony La Penna. Awards: Venice Film Festival, Special Mention, 1946; New York Film Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, 1948. Publications Script: Rossellini, Roberto, and others, Paisan, in The War Trilogy: Open City, Paisan, Germany—Year Zero, edited by Stefano Roncoroni, New York, 1973; also included in Rosselliniana: Bibliografia internazionale, dossier ‘‘Paisà” edited by Adriano Apra, Rome, 1987. Books: Hovald, Patrice, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1958. Mida, Massimo, Roberto Rossellini, Parma, 1961. Verdone, Mario, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1963. Guarner, Jose Luis, Roberto Rossellini, New York, 1970 Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1971. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, Berkely, 1971. Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema, New York, 1972. Baldelli, Pio, Roberto Rossellini, Rome, 1972. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey 1: The Cinema through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Rondolino, Gianni, Roberto Rossellini, Florence, 1974. MacBean, James Roy, Film and Revolution, Bloomington, Indi- ana, 1975. Overby, David, editor, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, Hamden, Connecticut, 1978. Ranvaud, Don, Roberto Rossellini, London, 1981. Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York, 1983. Rossellini, Roberto. Le Cinéma Révélé, edited by Alain Bergala, Paris, 1984. Hillier, Jim, editor, Cahiers du Cinéma 1: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London, 1985. Serceau, Michel, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1986. Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini, Oxford, 1987, 1996. Gansera, Rainer, and others, Roberto Rossellini, Munich, 1987. Rossellini, Roberto, Il mio metodo: Scritti e intervisti, edited by Adriano Apra, Venice, 1987. Rossi, Patrizio, Roberto Rossellini: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Bondanella, Peter, Films of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1993. Rossellini, Roberto, My Method: Writings and Interviews, New York, 1995. Gallagher, Tag, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1998. Articles: Barty King, Hugh, ‘‘Seven Americans,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Autumn 1946. Anderson, Lindsay, in Sequence (London), Winter 1947. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 30 March 1948. Warshow, Robert, in Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey), July 1948. PAISà FILMS, 4 th EDITION 916 Paisà Variety (New York), 2 November 1948. Ordway, Peter, ‘‘Prophet with Honor: Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Thea- tre Arts (New York), January 1949. Manvell, Roger, ‘‘Paisan: How It Struck Our Contemporaries,’’ in Penguin Film Review (London), May 1949. Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), February 1951. Pacifici, Sergio J., ‘‘Notes on a Definition of Neorealism,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven), Summer 1956. Rhode, Eric, ‘‘Why Neorealism Failed,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Winter 1960–61. ‘‘The Achievement of Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1964. Johnson, Ian, in Films and Filming (London), February 1966. Helman, A., ‘‘Roberto Rossellini albo synteza antynomjii: Nasz Iluzjon,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), October 1973. Lawton, B., ‘‘Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction Reality,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. Prédal, René, ‘‘Roberto Rossellini, 1906–1977,’’ in Avant-Scéne du Cinéma (Paris), 15 February 1979. Pym, John, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1980. Brunette, Peter,’’Unity and Difference in Paisan,’’ in Studies in Literary Imagination, vol. 16, no. 1, 1983. Brunette, Peter, ‘‘Rossellini and Cinematic Realism,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), vol. 25, no. 1, 1985. Decaux, E., in Cinématographe (Paris), April 1985. Variety (New York), 24 August 1987. Sinclair, M., ‘‘Ellipsis in Rossellini’s Paisa: The Privileging of the Invisible,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 9, no. 1, 1988. Pinciroli, G., ‘‘Efficacia e completezza del gesto cinematografico a confronto in Paisà,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo, Italy), April 1990. Roncoroni, S., and E. Bruno, ‘‘Presentazione di due soggetti inediti di Sergio Amidei per Paisà di Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), December 1990. Dean, Peter, ‘‘Video: Paisa Directed by Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 8, August 1993. Wagstaff, Chris, ‘‘True Stories,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 8, August 1993. Brunette, P., ‘‘The Neo Bible,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 40, 17 October 1995. *** PARIS, TEXASFILMS, 4 th EDITION 917 Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, along with his Roma, città aperta (1945), introduced post-war American audiences to Italian neo- realism, which proved to be the first wave in a series of European influences that altered the shape of American cinema. Neo-realism, a movement that emerged from the shattered Italian film industry immediately after World War II, concerned itself with an almost documentary-like depiction of the hardship and suffering of the Italian people during and after World War II. Directors like Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took to the streets in order to make their films. In the process they articulated an aesthetic of cinematic realism that called for the use of non-professional actors, on-location shooting, the abandonment of slick ‘‘Hollywood’’ pro- duction values, and a self-conscious rejection of commercial consid- erations. What emerged was a fresh and energetic film style which largely rejuvenated the pre-war stagnation of the Italian cinema. Years later Rossellini wrote that he used this new approach to attempt to understand the events of the fascist years, which had overwhelmed him personally and the Italian people generally. He chose the particu- lar film style he did for its morally neutral approach; he simply wanted to observe reality objectively and to explore the facts that implicated his country in the fascist horror of the war. He also wanted to create a balance sheet on the experience so that Italians could begin to live life on new terms. Paisà contains six episodes that trace the American invasion of Italy from the Allied landing in Sicily in 1934 until the Italian surrender in the spring of 1944. Rossellini does not present the war in terms of armies, strategies, and grand plans but rather as a tragedy involving the death and the suffering of human beings caught in the crush of forces beyond their control. Although some of the critics, among them Robert Warshow, found the film too sentimental in places, Paisà received good reviews outside of Italy, and it has retained its place as one of the classics of neo-realism, especially in the United States. Neo-realism and Rossellini’s remarks concerning Paisà raise some interesting questions about the mimetic nature of film and about the significance of a point of view of doctrine in shaping the final cinematic product. Paisà is neither a doctrinaire film nor, as Rossellini would have it, a neutral one. The film is not a long documentary, as some critics have rather simple-mindedly suggested, nor is it a film guided by a manifesto. It is a film which provides a new beginning, to borrow Rossellini’s balance sheet metaphor, and does so by stripping film of the appurtenances of the pre-war studio world. Rossellini was striving for a basic sincerity in his films, and it was primarily toward that end that he made Paisà with a truthful simplicity which is so effective. —Charles L. P. Silet PANDORA’S BOX See DIE BUCHSE DER PANDORA PAPER FLOWERS See KAAGAZ KE PHOOL PARIS, TEXAS West Germany-France, 1984 Director: Wim Wenders Production: Road Movies Filmproduktion (West Berlin)/Argos Films (Paris), in association with Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Channel 4, and Project Film; in color; running time: 148 minutes; length: 13,320 feet. Released 1984. Executive producer: Chris Sievernich; producers: Don Guest, Anatole Dauman; screenplay: Sam Shepard; assistant director: Claire Denis; photography: Robby Muller; assistant photogra- phers: Agnes Godard, Pim Tjujerman; editor: Peter Pryzgodda; assistant editor: Anne Schnee; sound editor: Dominique Auvray; sound recordist: Jean-Paul Mugel; sound re-recordist: Hartmut Eichgrun; art director: Kate Altman; music: Ry Cooder. Cast: Harry Dean Stanton (Travis Anderson); Dean Stockwell (Wal- ter R. Anderson); Aurore Clement (Anne Anderson); Hunter Carson (Hunter Anderson); Nastassja Kinski (Jane); Bernhard Wicki (Doc- tor Ulmer); Sam Berry (Gas Station Attendant); Claresie Mobley (Car Rental Clerk); Viva Auder (Woman on TV); Socorro Valdez (Carmelita); Edward Fayton (Hunter’s Friend); Justin Hogg (Hunter, age 3); Tom Farrell (Screaming Man); John Lurie (‘‘Slater’’); Jeni Vici (‘‘Stretch’’); Sally Norwell (‘‘Nurse Bibs’’); Sharon Menzel (Comedienne); The Mydolls (Rehearsing Band). Awards: BAFTA Award for Best Director, 1984. Palme d’Or at Cannes, 1984. Publications Script: Shepard, Sam, Paris, Texas (in English, French and German), edited by Chris Sievernin, Berlin, 1984. Books: Devillers, Jean-Pierre, Berlin, L.A., Berlin: Wim Wenders, Paris, 1985. Boujut, Michel, Wim Wenders, third edition, Paris, 1986. Wenders, Wim, Written in the West: Photographien aus dem Amerikanischen Western, Munich, 1987. Geist, Kathe, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France, to Paris, Texas, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1988. Kolker, Robert P., and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, New York, 1993. Cook, Roger F., and Gerd Gemunden, editors, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative and the Postmodern Condition, Detroit, 1997. Wenders, Wim, The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations, translated by Michael Hofmann, New York, 1999. PARIS, TEXAS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 918 Articles: Berthelius, M., ‘‘Dr?mmen om Amerika: Historien om Wim Wenders,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 26, no. 3, 1984. Variety (New York), 23 May 1984. Carson, Kit, in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1984. Bergala, Alain, and others, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Sum- mer 1984. Welsh, H., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1984. Johnston, Sheila, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1984. ‘‘Production Diary’’ in Cinema (West Germany), August, Septem- ber, and October 1984. Bishop, R., and T. Ryan, ‘‘Wim Wenders: An American Saga,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), August 1984. Pym, John, ‘‘The Road from Wuppertal,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1984. Ranvaud, Don, ‘‘Paris, Texas, to Sydney, Australia,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1984. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), September 1984. Simsolo, No?l, and others, in Revue du Cinéma/Image et Son (Paris), September 1984. Goldschmidt, D., in Cinématographe (Paris), September-October 1984. Baron, Saskia, in Stills (London), October 1984. Proper, R. A. F., interview with Robby Müller, in Skoop (Amster- dam), November 1984. Simons, J., ‘‘Paris, Texas: Wim Wenders’ Wedergeboorte,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), November-December 1984. Film (West Germany), December 1984. Kornum Larsen, J., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), December 1984. Verstappen, W., in Skoop (Amsterdam), December 1984-January 1985. Dieckmann, F., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1984–85. Wooton, Adrian, in Film Directions (Belfast), Winter 1984–85. Bromet, Frans, and M. J. A. Holland, in Skoop (Amsterdam), Febru- ary 1985. Scharres, B., ‘‘Robby Müller and Paris, Texas,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), February 1985. Freitag, I., in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), February-March 1985. De Gaetano, R., and P. Lughi, in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), June 1985. Fantauzzi, S., ‘‘Wenders e il suo angelo,’’ in Quaderni di Cinema (Florence), March-April 1989. Russell, D., ‘‘The American Trauma: Paris, Texas,’’ in Movie, no. 34–35, Winter 1990. Saint-Ellier, A., ‘‘L’epuisement du droit au secours des pirates?’’ in Film Exchange (Paris), vol. 51, no. 3, 1990. Denzin, N.K., ‘‘Paris, Texas and Baudrillard on America,’’ in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 2, 1991. Van Oostrum, D., ‘‘Wim Wender’s Euro-American Construction Site: Paris, Texas or Texas, Paris,’’ in Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, vol. 16, 1991. Luprecht, Mark, ‘‘Freud at Paris, Texas: Penetrating the Oedipal Sub-Text,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 20, no. 2, 1992. Aldarondo, R., in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 16, October 1994. Edwards, C., ‘‘Dean Stockwell,’’ in Psychotronic Video (Narrowsburg), no. 21, 1995. Smith, R.C., ‘‘Open Narrative in Robbe-Grillet’s Glissements progressifs du plaisir and Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 23, no. 1, January 1995. Reitinger, D.W., ‘‘Too Long in the Wasteland: Visions of the American West in Film, 1980–1990,’’ in Film and History (Cleve- land), vol. 26, no. 1/4, 1996. Falkowska, J., ‘‘American and European Voices in the Films of European Filmmakers Wim Wenders, Percy Adlon and Aki Kaurismaki,’’ in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Ottawa), vol. 6, no. 1, 1997. Tunney, Tom, ‘‘Paris, Texas,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 8, no. 1, January 1998. *** It is not just the title of this film which suggests a meeting between Europe and America. Production involved collaboration between the director Wim Wenders, who caught the critical eye as part of the new German cinema of the 1970s, and the scriptwriter Sam Shepard, the American author of The Motel Chronicles, poems and prose about highway culture in the United States. There was a deliberate policy of substantially developing the script as shooting progressed (indeed the script was completed by Kit Carson when Shepard departed for another commitment during production). Wenders has always been fascinated with Hollywood as a mode of representation. Many of his films approach the legacy of American cinema through a strategy of quotation. Yet Paris, Texas invests directly in an emotional folkloric tale of white America. At the same time the film opts for complexity: in particular, the present lives of the main characters are shown to be psychologically haunted by past events, and contained within the story is a special emphasis on the power of images in their own right. Paris, Texas knowingly reworks elements from both classical Holly- wood and European art cinema. Whether it exhausts these categories or expresses a contemporary condition of nihilism is open to debate. Road movies and family melodramas are the chief genres on which Paris, Texas draws. However, the way in which mise-en-scène establishes a sharp contrast between humanity and nature, during the opening stages in particular, is highly reminiscent of the western. The startling drama of the opening sequence depends on the way Travis, the main character, is counterposed with the desert. Yet he lacks the clear cut motivation to triumph over this wilderness. When collected by his brother Walt, Travis is incongruously dressed in a battered suit with a trucker’s cap. He is silent, refusing to explain why he disappeared four years previously, and where he has been. In Paris, Texas the mythical conquest of nature involves recalling the hero himself from the wilderness. The latter is also a mental condition. Travis has regressed from social values, and in a sense the rest of the film is about his reintegration with American society. Travis’s first articulated memory is Paris, Texas, a plot of land which he purchased and where he claims to have been conceived. One could say that Travis’s return to civilisation is marked by his recall of land ownership and the nuclear family. But Paris, Texas is a painful memory. The land remains unoccupied because Travis’s own family is broken. Family reunion becomes the narrative goal. The film renews a type of plot which theorists, notably Peter Wollen, have located within classical cinema. In this kind of plot the central protagonists search for an object of value which has disap- peared in the past. The object may often be a woman. In Paris, Texas she is Jane, Travis’s wife. Father and son quest for her after being UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 919 reunited themselves, a development which tears Hunter away from the stable and caring guardianship of Walt and Annie. The quest provides a sense of purpose lacking from Wenders’s previous films. Jane’s discovery promises to reveal the past and save Travis. When they finally meet in a peepshow we learn that Travis’s violent desire to own Jane was an initial cause of rupture. Travis is the voyeur looking in, while Jane is confined to the sound of his voice and her reflection in a one way mirror. Somehow on a second meeting here, they achieve a degree of mutual recognition, finding catharsis through confession to one another. The narrative winds down as the film alternates between them, finally moving to her side of the partition. Slight changes of camera angle open up the oppressed space. Quick cuts between them express the return of a bond, and at the end of the scene Travis turns off his booth light so that Jane can see him. He is resigned, distant, an illuminated image, the ghostly but overwhelming memory which has returned to Jane. Thus, in a powerful fashion, through a cinematic array of devices, we are presented with an imaginary realm within the fiction. Throughout, a form of dominance is attributed to the image itself: Paris, Texas remains a crumpled photograph; the family is only seen united, enjoying themselves in a super 8 film. Meanwhile America itself appears to be filtered through the processes of representation. Not only is the country portrayed as the endless space of the road movie, but also through such motifs as the Statue of Liberty, which pops up in the background of one shot as a mural. This detail connotes Americana, a symbolic substitute for the nation. While, the action is strictly kept to the periphery of cities, the identity of America remains mysterious, a miragelike entity viewed from the distant perspective of Travis, the outsider. Maybe one reason why a European filmmaker can deal with American mythology in the 1980s is because Holly- wood’s stable representations of the nation are increasingly worked through high-tech science fiction, spectacle, and more marginal discourses than in the classical era. Paris, Texas is surely aware of this. After all, Hunter is depicted as a Star Wars fan. With the older mythologies vacated by the heavyweights of Hollywood, Paris, Texas is left free to renew a language which is more imaginary than ever. —Daniel Williams UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE (A Day in the Country) France, 1946 Director: Jean Renoir Production: Pantheon-Production; black and white, 35mm; running time: 45 minutes; length: 1100 meters, originally 1232 meters. Released 8 May 1946, Paris. Filmed July-August 1936 near Montigny and Marlotte. Producer: Pierre Braunberger; executive producer: Jacques B. Brunius, with Roger Woog; screenplay: Jean Renoir, from the story by Guy Maupassant; photography: Claude Renior; editor: Marguerite Houle-Renoir, final version: Marienette Cadix under Marguerite Houle-Renoir’s supervision, assisted by Marcel Cravenne; sound: Courme de Bretagne and Joseph de Bretagne; production designer: Robert Gys; music: Joseph Kosma and Germaine Montero; assistant to the director: Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-Bresson, other contributors to this film include: Claude Heymann, Luchino Visconti, and Yves Allegret. Cast: Sylvia Bataille (Henriette); Georges Darnoux (Henri); Jeanne Marken (Madame Dufour); Jacques Borel (Rodolphe); Paul Temps (Anatole); Gabrielle Fontan (Grandmother); Jean Renoir (Father Poulain); Marguerite Renoir (The servant); Gabriello (M. Cyprien Dufour); Pierre Lestringuez (Old priest). Publications Script: Renoir, Jean, Une Partie de campagne, in Image et Son (Paris), April- May 1962; excerpts in Jean Renoir: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, by Pierre Leprohon, New York, 1971. Books: Davay, Paul, Jean Renoir, Brussels, 1957. Cauliez, Armand-Jean, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1962. Renoir, Jean, Renoir, My Father, Boston, 1962. Chardère, Bernard, editor, Jean Renoir, Lyons,1962. Bennett, Susan, Study Unit 8: Jean Renoir, London, 1967. Poulle, Fran?ois, Renoir, 1938, Paris, 1969. Gregor, Ulrich, editor, Jean Renoir und seine Film: Eine Dokumentation, Bad Ems, 1970. Cuenca, Carlos, Humanidad de Jean Renoir, Valladolid, 1971. Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films, New York, 1972. Bazin, André, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir, Berkeley, 1974. Harcourt, Peter, Six European Directors: Essays on the Meaning of Film Style, Baltimore, 1974. Beylie, Claude, Jean Renoir: Le Spectacle, la vie, Paris, 1975. Gilliatt, Penelope, Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, New York, 1975. Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Sesonske, Alexander, Jean Renoir: The French Films 1924–1939, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1980. Gauteur, Claude, Jean Renoir: Oeuvres de cinéma inédites, Paris, 1981. McBride, Joseph, editor, Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute seminars on Motion Pictures and Television, vol. 2, Los Angeles, 1983. Sarceau, Daniel, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1985. UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 920 Une partie de campagne Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Prince- ton, 1986. Vincendeau, Ginette, and Keith Reader, La Vie est à nous: French Cinema of the Popular Front 1935–1938, London, 1986. Viry-Babel, Roger, Jean Renoir: Le Jeu et la règle, Paris, 1986. Articles: Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 13 December 1950. Variety (New York), 20 December 1950. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1952. Bérangert, Jean, ‘‘The Illustrious Career of Jean Renoir,’’ in Yale French Studies, (New Haven), Summer 1956. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Christmas 1957. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘The Renaissance of the French Cinema—Feyder, Renoir, Duvivier, Carné,’’ in Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot, New York, 1959. Dyer, Peter John, ‘‘Renoir and Realism,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1960. Whitehall, Richard, in Films and Filming (London), June and July 1960. Durgnat, Raymond, ‘‘Eroticism in Cinema—Part 7: Symbolism— Another Word for it,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1962. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘Cette male gaité,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 December 1962. Howard R. G., in Film Journal (New York), July 1964. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. Nogueira, Rui, and Fran?ois Truchaud, ‘‘Interview with Jean Renoir,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1968. Bodelsen, A., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), October 1972. Wiese, Epi, ‘‘Visconti and Renoir: Shadowplay,’’ in Yale Review (New Haven), December 1974. Bagh, P. von, ‘‘Kaski kertaa Une Partie de campagne,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 7, 1976. Magny, Joel, ‘‘Partie de campagne: Les Bas-fonds,’’ in Téléciné (Paris), April 1977. Comolli, J. L., ‘‘Jean Renoir: En revoyant Une Partie de campagne. . . ,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1979. Strebel, Elizabeth Grottle, ‘‘Jean Renoir and the Popular Front,’’ in Feature Films as History, edited by K. R. M. Short, London, 1981. Odin, R., ‘‘Strategia del desiderio in un’ ‘inquadratura di’ Une Partie de campagne,’’ in Filmcritica (Florence), June 1982. LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARCFILMS, 4 th EDITION 921 Baron, R. F., ‘‘Renoir’s Neglected Masterpiece: Une Partie de campagne,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Fall 1983. Pescatore, G., ‘‘La grana del cinema,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Bolo- gna), January-August 1989. Webster, R.M., ‘‘Renoir’s Une partie de campagne: Film as the Art of Fishing,’’ in French Review, vol. 64, no. 3, 1991. Tesson, Charles, ‘‘La robe sans couture, la danse, le patron,’’ in Cinémathèque (Paris), no. 5, Spring 1994. Magny, J., ‘‘Partie de campagne deuxiem!’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 479–80, May 1994. Bénoliel, Bernard, ‘‘Autour d’Une partie de campagne,’’ in Mensuel du Cinéma (Paris), no. 18, June 1994. Curchod, Oliver, and others, ‘‘Partie de campagne de Jean Renoir,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 408, February 1995. *** André Bazin, in his unfinished study of Jean Renoir, described Une partie de campagne as a ‘‘perfectly finished work,’’ one that is not only faithful in letter and spirit to the Maupassant story from which it was adapted but also actually improved by Renoir’s additions and refinements to the original tale. This is high praise, indeed, when one realizes that the film’s completion was highly problematic. Many of Renoir’s films have had checkered careers, but none was quite so confusing as Une partie de campagne. Renoir originally intended to shoot a 35- or 40-minute story which he would make, he wrote later, just as if it were a full-length film. Renoir chose a gentle, 19th-century tale and planned to spend a relaxed summer filming along the banks of the Loin near Marlotte, an area he knew extremely well. The entire experience should have provided him, as Alexander Sesonske has described it, with a ‘‘brief and pleasant respite in mid-career.’’ Despite the rainiest summer in memory, an extremely volatile politi- cal climate, tensions on the set and the fact that the film sat for nearly 10 years waiting for its final editing, Une partie de campagne is a remarkably fine film, some say a masterpiece; Sesonske thinks that no Renoir film seems ‘‘more unstudied, more a pure flow of life caught unaware.’’ There are sound reasons for the film’s critical success: it is a film of uncommon gentleness and beauty, and it forms less of a ‘‘respite’’ in Renoir’s career than a concentration of his most important themes and images: the river, the countryside, the loving scrutiny of bour- geois life. Une partie de campagne forms a poetic centre for Renoir’s French films. Rather than a sense of diversion, the film reflects a completeness. Renoir’s rendering of his subject matter is incisive, his style mature, his vision complete; it is a seamless work of art. Many critics have called attention to the film’s impressionistic quality, suggesting that it is a homage to the director’s father, the painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. Indeed, impressionistic moments do grace the film—but for one to try to understand it as an attempt by the son to do what the father had already done with paint and canvas is to sadly underestimate the qualities of the movie. The ‘‘painterly’’ look of the films of Renoir fils have done much to strengthen his popular image as a director of surfaces, much to the detriment of his standing as a filmmaker of depth and perception. The shortness of the film also has strengthened the perception of Renoir as an impressionistic filmmaker, and many critics today still respond to the film as incomplete, an interesting but unfinished experiment. The fact that Renoir left two scenes from the Maupassant story unshot has been used as evidence for regarding the film as a fragment, and considering Renoir’s relative fidelity to the events of Maupassant’s tale, it is an understandable, if mistaken, conclusion. Published versions of the screenplay for those ‘‘missing’’ scenes have further confused the issue. However, closer examination of the relationship between the story and the film will dispel such miscon- ceptions. Renoir wrote in his autobiography, My Life and My Films, that when he was asked to increase the original footage to feature length, he refused because he felt that it would have been contrary to the intent of Maupassant’s story and to his screenplay to lengthen it. Moreover, what many critics have failed to notice is that Renoir, although he adapted the events of the fiction faithfully, greatly altered the story’s tone, which allowed him to drop the final scenes from the completed film without leaving the project incomplete. Maupassant’s tantalizingly brief tale is largely satiric in tone. He makes fun of the pretensions and foibles of his bourgeoisie often rather harshly; the natural setting is kept in the background; and the atmosphere of the country is diminished. Renoir not only places greater emphasis in the rural atmosphere and setting but also makes a film that by bringing such natural elements into the foreground turns Maupassant’s rather strident attack on the Dufort family into a com- passionate and understanding film about unrecoverable moments and the inevitable sadness of the loss of innocence and love. As André Bazin has noted, such changes do improve the original. The story is given a resonance, the characters motivation, and the ending a poignance lacking in the fictional source. As Pierre Leprohon has described it: ‘‘there is an overflowing tenderness, and extraordinary responsive- ness to the existence of things, and a transformation of the common- place into the sublime.’’ In Une partie de campagne, Renoir has created a poetic compression of those things that he holds dear, which is one of the reasons the film evokes such fond memories and responses from its viewers. Although unhappy and somewhat ironic, the ending is nevertheless not unhopeful. Life and the river will both flow on and be renewed. —Charles L. P. Silet THE PASSENGER See PROFESSIONE: REPORTER LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC (The Passion of Joan of Arc) France, 1928 Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer Production: Société Générale des Films (Paris); black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: originally 110 minutes, later 86–88 minutes; length: 2400 meters. Released 21 April 1928, Paladsteatret, Copenhagen. Re-released 1952 in sound version produced by Gaumont Actualité and supervised by Lo Duca, musical accompaniment from works by Scarlatti, Albinoni, Gemianani, Vivaldi, and Bach. Filmed May-October 1927 in Paris. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Joseph Delteil, from a book by Joseph Delteil; titles: Carl Theodor Dreyer; photography: Rudolph LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC FILMS, 4 th EDITION 922 La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc Maté; editor: Carl Theodor Dreyer; art directors: Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo; costume designer: Valentine Hugo; historical consultant: Pierre Champion; assistants: Paul la Cour and Ralph Holm. Cast: Maria Falconetti (Joan); Eugéne Silvain (Pierre Cauchon); André Berley (Jean d’Estivet); Maurice Schutz (Nicolas Loyseleur); Antonin Artaud (Jean Massieu); Michel Simon (Jean Lema?tre); Jean d’Yd (Guillaume Evrard); Ravet (Jean Beaupére); André Lurville; Jacques Arma; Alexandre Mihalesco; R. Narlay; Henri Gaultier; Paul Jorge. Publications Script: Dreyer, Carl Theodor, ‘‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, in Four Screen- plays, London, 1970. Drouzy, Maurice, and Charles Tesson, editors, Carl Theodor Dreyer: Oeuvres cinématographiques 1926–1923, Paris 1983. ‘‘La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc Issue’’ of Avant-Scène Cinéma (Paris), January-February 1988. Books: Neergaard, Ebbe, Carl Theodor Dreyer: A Film Director’s Work, London, 1950. Trolle, B?rge, The Art of Carl Theodor Dreyer: An Analysis, Copen- hagen, 1955. Bowser, Eileen, The Films of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1964. Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Om Filmen, Copenhagen, 1964. Monty, Ib, Portrait of Carl Th. Dreyer, Copenhagen, 1965. Dyssegaard, Soren, editor, Carl Th. Dreyer, Danish Film Director, Copenhagen, 1968. Ayfré, Amédée, Le Cinéma et sa vérité, Paris, 1969. Perrin, Claude, Carl Th. Dreyer, Paris, 1969. Milne, Tom, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1971. Ernst, Helge, Dreyer: Carl Th. Dreyer—en dansk filmskaber, Copen- hagen, 1972. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Los Angeles, 1972. Bordwell, David, editor, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Skoller, Donald, editor, Dreyer in Double Reflection, New York, 1973. LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARCFILMS, 4 th EDITION 923 Nash, Mark, Dreyer, London, 1977. Tone, Pier Giorgio, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Florence, 1978. Bordwell, David, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley, 1981. Pipolo, Anthony P., Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc: A Comparison of Prints and Formal Analysis, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Carney, Raymond, Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1989. Jensen, Jytte, editor, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, New York, 1989. Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Dreyer in Double Reflection: Carl Dreyer’s Writings on Film, Cambridge, 1991. Drum, Jean, and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Lanham, 2000. Articles: Close Up (London), July 1928. Variety (New York), 10 April 1929. Theatre Arts (New York), 13 May 1929. Ecran Fran?ais (Paris), 11 November 1947. Winge, John, ‘‘Interview with Dreyer,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), January 1950 Manvell, Roger, in Sight and Sound (London), December 1950. Ayfré, Amédée, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 17, 1952. Marker, Chris, in Regards neufs sur le cinéma, edited by Jacques Chevallier, Paris, 1953. Terzi, Corrado, in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), no. 17, 1953. Everson, William K., ‘‘Rudy Maté—His Work with Carl Dreyer,’’ in Films and Filming (London), no. 2, 1955. Dreyer, Carl, ‘‘Thoughts on My Craft,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955–56. Trolle, B?rge, ‘‘The World of Carl Dreyer,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955–56. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Dreyer,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1961. Stanbrook, Alan, in Films and Filming (London), June 1961. Sémolué, Jean, ‘‘‘Douleur, Noblesse Unique’, ou, La Passion chez Carl Dreyer,’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), Fall 1961. Sémolué, Jean, ‘‘Passion et procès (de Dreyer à Bresson),’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), nos. 18–19, 1962. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Rudolph Maté: Photographed Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc and Became Director on His Own,’’ in Films in Review (New York), no. 8, 1964. Delmas, Jean, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), no. 5, 1965. Zurbuch, Werner, ‘‘Interview med Herman Warm,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), no. 71, 1965. Bond, Kirk, ‘‘The World of Carl Dreyer,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Fall 1965. Milne, Tom, ‘‘Darkness and Light: Carl Dreyer,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1965. Lerner, Carl, ‘‘My Way of Working Is in Relation to the Future: A Conversation with Carl Dreyer,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1966. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘Fonctions du gros plan et du cadrage dans La passion de Jeanne d’Arc,’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), no. 53–56, 1967. Duperly, Denis, ‘‘Carl Dreyer: Utter Bore or Total Genius?,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1968. Kosmorama (Copenhagen), June 1968. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1968. Delahaye, Michael, in Interviews with Film Directors, edited by Andrew Sarris, New York, 1969. Potamkin, Harry Alan, in The Emergence of Film Art, by Lewis Jacobs, New York, 1969. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), February 1970. Bu?uel, Luis, in Positif (Paris), February 1973. Vaughan, Dai, ‘‘Carl Dreyer and The Theme of Choice,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1974. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Carl Dreyer,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March- April 1974. Van Ness, Wilhelmina, ‘‘Joseph Delteil: The Passion of Joan of Arc,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no.4, 1975. Petric, Vlada, ‘‘Dreyer’s Concept of Abstraction,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1975. Bordwell, David, ‘‘Dreyer’s Joan,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1975. Hugo, V., J. de Lacretelle, and P. Morand, in Avant-Scéne du Cinéma (Paris), 1 December 1977. Oudart, Jean-Pierre, ‘‘Une Peur active,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 292, 1978. Cros, J. L., in Image et Son (Paris), September 1978. Linderman, Deborah, ‘‘Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), no. 3, 1980. Tesson, Charles, ‘‘Jeanne d’Arc sauvé des flammes,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1984. Enberg, M., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), May 1985. Drouzy, Maurice, ‘‘Jeanne d’Arc livrée aux borreaux,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), June 1985. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), Sum- mer 1985. Nash, M., ‘‘Joan Complete,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Sum- mer 1985. Neyt, G., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), October 1985. ‘‘Jeanne d’Arc Section’’ of Skrien (Amsterdam), November-Decem- ber 1985. Meyer, M.P., ‘‘La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc: Muziek als hindernis,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), Winter 1985–86. ‘‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc,’’ in a Special Issue of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 367–368, January-February 1988. Willmott, G., ‘‘Implications for a Sartrean Radical Medium: From Theatre to Cinema,’’ in Discourse (Bloomington, Indiana), Spring- Summer 1990. Martensen-Larsen, B., ‘‘Inspirationen fra middelalderens miniaturer,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Summer 1993. DeBartolo, J., ‘‘Video Tape Reviews,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 5, May 1995. Dupre la Tour, C., ‘‘The Written Word and Memory in Griffith’s Intolerance and Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 19, Autumn 1995. Kauffman, S., ‘‘French Saint: French Mortals,’’ in New Republic, vol. 213, 20 November 1995. Potter, Nicole, ‘‘The Passion of Joan of Arc/Voices of Light,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 47, no. 3–4, March-April 1996. O’Brien, Charles, ‘‘Rethinking National Cinema: Dreyer’s La pas- sion de Jeanne d’Arc and the Academic Aesthetic,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 35, no. 4, Summer 1996. PASSPORT TO PIMLICO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 924 Stackpole, J., ‘‘One Hardly Expects Language to Be a Contributing Factor,’’ in Audience (Simi Valley), no. 192, December/Janu- ary 1997. Nichols, Peter M., ‘‘In a Joan of Arc Season, One Telling is Timeless,’’ in New York Times, 24 October 1999. Smith, Gavin, ‘‘The Passion of Joan of Arc/Jeanne la Pucelle,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 35, no. 6, November/Decem- ber 1999. *** Carl Dreyer’s last silent film is one of the most famous films in the history of cinema. It is seldom missing on ‘‘World’s Ten Best Films’’ lists. Few films have been studied and analyzed as thoroughly in articles and books, and one sometimes feels that the real film is buried in the theory and aesthetics. But, a true classical work of art, La passion de Jeanne d’Arc appeals to and moves the spectator with its beautiful simplicity. It is a pure tragedy of a young suffering woman fighting in a hostile world. The finest homage to the film is perhaps that of Jean-Luc Godard: in his film Vivre sa vie the prostitute (played by Anna Karina) is deeply moved by Dreyer’s portrait of the legendary heroine when she sees the film in a Paris cinema in the 1960s. She can identify with the tormented young woman in this timeless film. From the time he started his script in October 1926 until the film was finished, Dreyer worked on it for a year and a half. The historical trial of Jeanne lasted for more than a year. Dreyer concentrated the actual 29 interrogations into one long interrogation, and in the film it takes place on 30 May 1431, the last day of Jeanne’s short life; Dreyer thus keeps to the unities of time, place and story. The style of the film, which has been called a film in close-ups, is derived directly from his sources and evokes the protocol of the trial. When the film was released, the close-up technique was regarded as shocking. Dreyer defended his method by stating: ‘‘The records give a shattering impression on the ways in which the trial was a conspir- acy of the judges against the solitary Jeanne, bravely defending herself against men who displayed a devilish cunning to trap her in their net. This conspiracy could be conveyed on the screen only through the huge close-ups, that exposed, with merciless realism, the callous cynicism of the judges hidden behind hypocritical compassion— and on the other hand there had to be equally huge close-ups of Jeanne, whose pure features would reveal that she alone found strength in her faith in God.’’ As in all of Dreyer’s major films the style grew out of the theme of the film. In La passion de Jeanne d’Arc Dreyer wanted ‘‘to move the audience so that they would themselves feel the suffering that Jeanne endured.’’ It was by using close-up that Dreyer could ‘‘lead the audience all the way into the hearts and guts of Jeanne and the judges.’’ The close-up technique is the core of the film, because it lifts the drama above a given place and a given time. It is a satisfactory way of abstracting from an historically defined reality without abandoning a respect for authenticity and realism. But this striving for timelessness is reflected in all the components of the film. And there is more to the film than close-ups. Dreyer uses medium close-ups, tilts, pans, travelling shots and intricate editing. Cross-cutting is used to great effect, especially in the last part of the film, and the hectic rhythm and swiftly changing shots towards the end of the film are as masterfully controlled as the close-ups. The visual language is very complex and not in the least monotonous. The sets and the costumes were con- sciously created in a way that furthered the balance between the historical and the modern. The lighting, the overall whiteness of the images, contributes to the film’s emphasis on the simple and the lucid. Dramatically, La passion de Jeanne d’Arc is composed as one long scene. This is Jeanne’s last struggle, and the battle is for her life and her soul. The film is dramatically and psychologically intensified in two scenes. The first when Jeanne breaks down mentally and, to save her life, signs a confession as a heretic. The second is the scene in which she regrets what she has done and withdraws the confession. She knows then that her death is certain, but she saves her soul, and she triumphs in her faith. La passion de Jeanne d’Arc is an intense description of the suffering of an individual, the drama of a soul transformed into images. It is a ‘‘cool’’ look, and Dreyer called his method ‘‘realized mysticism.’’ With his sober objectivity Dreyer succeeded in making the difficult understandable and the irrational clear. The film is about the necessity of suffering for the liberation of the individual human being. As do all of Dreyer’s heroines, Jeanne suffers defeat, but for Dreyer defeat or victory in this world is of no importance. The essential thing is the soul’s victory over life. Dreyer’s view of the historical facts is, of course, not a balanced one. Jeanne is the heroine, and Dreyer is on her side in a struggle against a cruel, official world. In Dreyer’s oeuvre La passion de Jeanne d’Arc brings together all the resources of the cinema at that time, and is the most pure and perfect expression of his art. Of none of his films is his own statement more fitting: ‘‘The soul is revealed in the style, which is the artist’s expression on the way he regards his material.’’ The film was well received when it was released, but it was not a commercial success. Since then the film’s reputation has grown, and for many years it has been continuously shown in film archives and film clubs all over the world. The original negative of La passion de Jeanne d’Arc was destroyed in a fire in 1928 at UFA in Berlin. Film archeologists are still working on a restoration of the film, which has survived in many slightly differing versions—but even a definitive version should not drastically change our impression of this masterpiece. —Ib Monty PASSPORT TO PIMLICO UK, 1949 Director: Henry Cornelius Production: Ealing Studios; black and white, 35mm; running time: 84 minutes. Released April 1949. Producer: Michael Balcon; associate producer: E. V. H. Emmett; screenplay: T. E. B. Clarke; photographer: Lionel Banes; art direction: Roy Oxley; music: Georges Auric; editor: Michael Truman. Cast: Stanley Holloway (Arthur Pemberton); Betty Warren (Connie Pemberton); Barbara Murray (Shirley Pemberton); Paul Dupuis PASSPORT TO PIMLICOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 925 Passport to Pimlico (Duke of Burgundy); Margaret Rutherford (Professor Hatton-Jones); Raymond Huntley (Wix); Hermoine Baddeley (Eddie Randall); Basil Radford (Gregg). Publications Books: Balcon, Michael, Michael Balcon Presents . . . A Lifetime of Films, London, Hutchinson, 1969. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror For England, London, Faber & Faber, 1970. Clarke, T. E. B., This Is Where I Came In, London, Michael Joseph, 1974. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of British Cinema, London, Secker & Warburg, 1978. Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, New York, Woodstock Press, 1980, 1999. Perry, George, Forever Ealing, London, Pavillion/Michael Joseph, 1981. Curran, James, and Vincent Porter, editors, British Cinema History, London, Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1983. Brown, Geoff, and Laurence Kardish, Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984; updated edition, 1990. Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel, London, Routledge, 1992. Articles: Ellis, John, ‘‘Made in Ealing,’’ from Screen (London), Vol 16, No. 1, Spring 1975. Brown, Geoff, ‘‘Ealing, Your Ealing,’’ from Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1977. Williams, Tony, ‘‘The Repressed Fantastic in Passport to Pimlico,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 16, no. 1–2, Fall-Winter 1991–1992. *** Passport to Pimlico has the distinction of making pouring rain and the onset of cold weather the satisfying and suitably up-beat coda to PASSPORT TO PIMLICO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 926 its story. Somehow the teasingly self-conscious shots of the Mediter- ranean or Latin American signifiers which open the film are indeed proven to be a dupe and a distraction from the reality that is Britain in the late forties. What we see in Passport to Pimlico, however, is a singularly Ealingesque version of reality, informed by Producer Michael Balcon’s pursuit of ‘‘Britishness’’ within the unique self- defining parameters of the ‘‘British Film.’’ The film becomes a vehi- cle by which the British may actually experience their fantasies and dreams only to find that they do not sit easily with the much more acceptable and comfortable aspects of merely trusting and enjoying the circumstances they have inherited. Far from being a reactionary and conservative position, this is viewed within the film as progres- sive because it sustains particular kinds of values and behaviour which would be lost to misdirected aspirations unsuitable to a British temperament, defined it seems, by wartime consensus and a nostalgia for imagined communities and significant nationhood. Passport to Pimlico was inspired by a news story in which it was reported that Princess Juliana had given birth to an heir to the throne during her wartime exile to Canada. It was first necessary, however, that the government make the maternity wing in which she was staying legally Dutch soil as the heir had to be born within the realm of the Netherlands. This unusual tale was adapted by screenwriter, T. E. B. Clarke into a story in which the inhabitants of Miramont Place in Pimlico suddenly discover that they are legally Burgundians when a wartime bomb accidentally explodes revealing the treasures of Burgundy and the lease that claims this piece of British soil as Burgundian. This narrative conceit produces circumstances which suggest particular scenarios about how people, and specifically, British people might behave liberated from the still operational post- war restrictions. Further, it serves as a test of the assumed power structures, value systems, and social hierarchies that constitute the cultural status quo, and thus, in turn operate as a metaphor for the flux of interests at large in the period of post-war reconstruction. This kind of narrative also becomes a model of the ‘‘What if?’’ scenario, so beloved of Balcon, when the Chaplinesque ‘‘little man’’ finds his voice and challenges the status quo at the moment of temporary social disruption. Further examples follow in Whisky Galore and The Man in the White Suit. Such films become invaluable for what they reveal and define about ‘‘Britishness.’’ Arthur Pemberton cherishes a plan to create a children’s play area from the wartime ruins but is dismissed with the rebuff that ‘‘This borough is in no position to finance daydreams.’’ This moment alone distills some of the film’s central premises about the tensions between pragmatism and imagination, forward-thinking and backward-look- ing, inhibition and liberation, and the role of the individual within the community. It is also a typically ‘‘Ealing’’ scenario, in that important issues in Ealing movies were often explored through narratives involving children. These films include Hue and Cry and Mandy. Pemberton equates the children’s play area with the future and the transition from post-war inertia into a new decade energised by the young. He sees this initiative as an opportunity to liberate a future generation into the freedoms fought for by his generation. Passport to Pimlico essentially examines the problems of this transition by demonstrating the possibilities inherent in having particular freedoms. Ironically, the bomb which reveals the Burgundian treasure is accidentally set off by a group of children. The treasure is only found when Pemberton himself inadvertently falls into the bomb-sight. When Pemberton and his daughter, Shirley, research the origin of the treasure, Shirley astutely anticipates the real implications of finding the haul, by refuting her father’s pride in discovering its heritage, by saying: ‘‘History, my foot. It’s money!’’ Once it is established that ‘‘these Londoners are technically Burgundians,’’ it becomes clear that the people of Pimlico enter a temporary Utopia which operates outside British law, and legitimises the fulfillment of individual appetites and desires. It also becomes clear that freedom from restriction reveals the deep structures of human imperatives—chiefly, the will to power and the instinct to indulge. The Burgundians celebrate by drinking, singing, and dancing, culminating their eve- ning of liberation with the destruction of their ration books, the everyday symbol of regulation and caution. Arguably, it is also at this point when democracy and nationalism are also in flux. The film uses the very appealing device of illustrating freedom without responsibility to demonstrate the necessity of certain social structures and institutions. These organisations preserve freedoms for everyone in the face of the inevitability of those people merely seeking to take advantage of situations for their own gain. By illustrating a possible utopia in excess, that essentially fails with the onslaught of black marketeers, criminal types, and self-interested government bureaucrats, Passport to Pimlico demonstrates and en- dorses the utopia of a civilised community with consensus politics sustaining the ideological status quo. When the Prince of Burgundy arrives, authenticated as the true Burgundian heir by the eccentric Professor Hatton-Jones (a typically joyous and bluster-filled performance by Margaret Rutherford), he also brings a genuine ‘‘Europeaness’’ which authenticates the freer, more sensual aspect of the new Pimlico lifestyle. His romantic endeavours with Shirley Pemberton are constantly thwarted, how- ever, as his role becomes further politicised, when Burgundy is forced to create its own democratic nation-state to resist the intervention of Britain. This process merely illustrates that Burgundy is a democracy modelled on Britain itself, and a microcosm of British life which best demonstrates the chief characteristics of ‘‘Britishness.’’ These largely concur with those characteristics outlined by Sir Stephen Tallents of the Empire Marketing Board in the early thirties, which stressed the disinterestedness of Britain in international affairs (i.e. a particular kind of ‘‘inwardness’’), traditions of justice, law and order, a sense of fair play and fair dealing, and a coolness in national character. Passport to Pimlico reinforces the inwardness of the British charac- ter, but emphasises a determination amongst the British people to see justice be done in an experiential rather than legal sense. Burgundy becomes the underdog, the disenfranchised, the mistreated, when it is estranged from the British government, but its predicament mobilises the support of the British people, who recognise their own indomita- ble spirit in the pursuit of a fair deal. Sympathy is further mobilised when Burgundy’s food supplies (largely care parcels provided by British supporters) are lost in a flood. These moments, of course, are all signifiers of wartime trials and tribulations which contemporary audiences readily recognised, identified with, and enjoyed. Consen- sus on screen becomes complicit consensus amongst viewers. When Burgundy is forced to rejoin Britain, it is the spirit of compromise and resolution which is celebrated. Pemberton succeeds in his dream to create a children’s recreation area with the proceeds of the Burgundy treasure, but perhaps more importantly, he and the community have succeeded in having a democratic voice. Govern- ment has succeeded in providing a solution to a complex social problem and has been warned of its complacency. With lessons learned and victories won, the ration book, now a symbol for rationale is reinstated. Passport to Pimlico is a tribute to the war effort, and not merely a nostalgic longing for its terms and conditions. It is a celebra- tion of what the British are, and what they want to be, and though it PATHS OF GLORYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 927 may seem conservative in its outlook to contemporary viewers, it represents a lack of cynicism which characterises the pride, dignity and hope many British people felt in the post-war period. Passport to Pimlico is about goodwill expressed with good humour. —Paul Wells PATHER PANCHALI See THE APU TRILOGY PATHS OF GLORY USA, 1957 Director: Stanley Kubrick Production: Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporatoin. A Bryna Produc- tions presentation, for United Artists; black and white; running time: 87 minutes; length: 7,783 feet. Released November 1957. Producer: James B. Harris; screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson, based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb; photography: George Krause; editor: Eva Kroll; sound: Martin Muller; art director: Ludwig Reiber; music: Gerald Fried; military adviser: Baron Von Waldenfels. Cast: Kirk Douglas (Colonel Dax); Ralph Meeker (Cpl. Paris); Adolphe Menjou (General Broulard); George Macready (General Mireau); Wayne Morris (Lt. Roget); Richard Anderson (Major Saint- Auban); Joseph Turkel (Private Arnaud); Timothy Carey (Private Ferol); Peter Capell (Colonel Judge); Susanne Christian (German Girl); Bert Freed (Sgt. Boulanger); Emile Meyer (Priest); John Stein (Captain Rosseau); Harold Benedict (Captain Nichols). Publications Books: Austen, David, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, London, 1969. Kagen, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York, 1972. Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick Directs, New York, 1972. Devries, Daniel, The Films of Stanley Kubrick, Grand Rapids, Michi- gan, 1973. Bobker, Lee, Elements of Film, New York, 1974. Phillips, Gene D., Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, New York, 1975. Ciment, Michel, Kubrick, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1987; trans- lated as Kubrick, London, 1983. Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Miller, Gabriel, Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film, New York, 1980. Hummel, Christoph, editor, Stanley Kubrick, Munich, 1984. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Stanley Kubrick: Tempo, spazio, storia, e mondi possibli, Parma, 1985. Mann, Michael, Kirk Douglas, New York, 1985. Douglas, Kirk, The Ragman’s Son, New York, 1988. Thomas, Tony, Films of Kirk Douglas, Secaucus, 1991. Falsetto, Mario, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Westport, 1994. Jenkins, Greg, Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation: Three Novels, Three Films, Jefferson, 1997. Howard, James, Stanley Kubrick Companion, London, 1999. Garcia Mainar, Luis M., Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, Rochester, 2000. Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, Bloom- ington, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 20 November 1957. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 23 November 1957. Kine Weekly (London), 26 December 1957. Lambert, Gavin, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1957–58. Film Culture (New York), February 1958. Houston, Penelope, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 25, no. 289, 1958. Kubrick, Stanley, ‘‘Words and Movies,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Winter 1961. Burgess, Jackson, ‘‘The Antimilitarism of Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1964. ‘‘Stanley Kubrick’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1964- January 1965. Strick, Phillip, and Penelope Houston, ‘‘Interview with Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1972. Monaco, James, ‘‘The Films of Stanley Kubrick,’’ in New School Bulletin (New York), Summer 1973. Deer, Harriet and Irving, ‘‘Kubrick and the Structures of Popular Culture,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington D.C.), Sum- mer 1974. Ferro, Marc, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), April 1975. Image et Son (Paris), September 1976. Binni, W., and A. Lombardo, ‘‘Poetiche ed ideologie di tre registi,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), January-February 1977. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1984. Walker, Alexander, in Radio Times (London), 25 April, 1985. Listener (London), 12 January 1989. Alonge, A. G., ‘‘Il nemico inesistente,’’ in Quaderni di Cinema (Florence), July-September 1990. Kelly, A., ‘‘The Brutality of Military Incompetence: Paths of Glory,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon, Oxfordshire), no. 2, 1993. Denby, David, ‘‘Voyage of the Damned: Paths of Glory Directed by Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 4, no. 11, July 1991. Kelly, Andrew, ‘‘The Brutality of Military Incompetence: Paths of Glory (1957),’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televi- sion (Abingdon), vol. 13, no. 2, June 1993. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), 15 November 1995. *** Humphrey Cobb’s poorly written but powerful novel of the French army in World War I was published in 1935. Some people in PATHS OF GLORY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 928 Paths of Glory Hollywood wanted to film it then but to change its setting to pre- Revolutionary Russia so as not to offend any existing government. In 1957, after Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson wrote the screenplay, nobody wanted to touch it until Kirk Douglas got behind the project. (Douglas claims that Kubrick then rewrote the story—including a happy ending with a last-minute reprieve for the condemned soldiers—in a wrong-headed effort to make it more commercial, but that he made Kubrick go back to the original script.) When it was released, the movie was not a commercial success—and it did offend the French government, which banned it for 20 years. Paths of Glory is Kubrick’s best motion picture. It lacks the discursiveness that characterizes all of his later work; true to its source, the movie is practically Aristotelian in its unity of action, time, and place. It has none of the lethargic pacing that mars parts of Lolita, much of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and all of Barry Lyndon; unlike those films, Paths has a constant, driving rhythm: usually the camera or the characters are always in motion, sometimes simultane- ously, as in cinematographer George Krause’s celebrated tracking shots: officers move through the trenches; the army makes its abortive attack on the Anthill (delicately renamed from the Pimple of the novel); the three court-martialed soldiers are led to their deaths by the firing squad; and, all the while, the camera travels with them, inexorably leading the characters and the viewer down these ‘‘paths of glory,’’ to the grave. And Paths of Glory is happily free from Kubrick’s unfortunate tendency toward misogyny. That’s partly because (discounting the extras at General Broulard’s soirée) there are no women in the movie—except for the one ‘‘enemy’’ captive, the only German whom we see. This young woman, coerced into singing for the rowdy troops, is the catalyst for the film’s poignant ending. After all the callous disregard for human life up to this point, we see the soldiers drop their mocking bravado one by one to hum along with her. (She is played by Susanne Christian, Kubrick’s third wife.) Paths of Glory is always hailed as a great anti-war film, and— visually—it does make a statement about the horrors of war, showing the broken and wounded in the trenches (almost off-handedly, as background) and the wholesale, senseless slaughter on the battlefield. But, even more than that, it is an anti-military film (and, by extension, an indictment of all hierarchical systems which sacrifice human beings for expediency). From the opening credits, over which ‘‘La Marseillaise’’ is martially played, ending on a discordant note, the film expands upon the novel’s themes, developing and driving home PEEPING TOMFILMS, 4 th EDITION 929 the point of the army as a corporation and its officers as ruthless businessmen, using subordinates for personal gain. General Broulard (Adolph Menjou) of the French high command approaches ambitious General Mireau (George Macready) with an impossible task—to take a highly fortified German position within 36 hours—dangling a promotion in front of him as incentive. (Menjou played many suave villains in his career, but casting him as the manipulative Broulard is doubly appropriate, since, in his private life, he was a notorious reactionary and one of the ‘‘friendly witnesses’’ when HUAC investigated Hollywood.) Talking himself into the success of the operation, Mireau then dumps its accomplishment on Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) and his battle-weary troops. (The role of Dax is fleshed out and conflated with that of Captain Etienne in the novel in order to give the film a hero, a moral center with which the audience can identify.) Mireau even goes so far as (unsuccessfully) to command his artillery to fire on those troops when the battle doesn’t go so well. He’s prevented by an ordnance officer who insists on having the order in writing—illustrating the First Rule of corporate life: ‘‘cover your ass.’’ When the attack fails, Mireau wants to cover his ass, so looks for a scapegoat and trumps up charges of cowardice against a trio of randomly selected soldiers. Dax argues their cases eloquently at the maddening kangaroo court martial which follows, to no avail. The novel concludes with the soldier’s executions; the film goes beyond that episode, bringing the corruption around full circle: instigator Broulard is the agent of Mireau’s comeuppance, giving the viewer some slight satisfaction (because the condemned men have already been killed). The ever-cynical Broulard misinterprets Dax’s motives in exposing Mireau, thinking Dax has done it to gain Mireau’s job (which Broulard is only too happy to give him). Dax bluntly disabuses Broulard, giving the viewer intense but fleeting satisfaction: Broulard has Dax and his men transferred back to the front. The system works—for those in charge of the system. —Anthony Ambrogio PEEPING TOM UK, 1960 Director: Michael Powell Production: Anglo Amalgamated; Eastmancolor, 35mm, running time: 109 minutes, other versions include 90 minutes and 86 minutes. Released April 1960, London. Producers: Michael Powell with Albert Fennell; screenplay: Leo Marks; photography: Otto Heller; editor: Noreen Ackland; sound: C. C. Stevens and Gordon McCallum; art director: Arthur Lawson; set decorator: Ivor Beddows; music: Brian Easdale. Cast: Karl Boehm (Mark Lewis); Moira Shearer (Vivian); Anna Massey (Helen Stephens); Maxine Audley (Mrs. Stephens); Esmond Knight (Arthur Baden); Bartlett Mullins (Mr. Peters); Shirley Ann Field (Diane Ashley); Michael Goodliffe (Don Jarvis); Brenda Bruce (Dora); Martin Miller (Dr. Rosan); Pamela Green (Milly); Jack Watson (Inspector Gregg); Nigel Davenport (Sergeant Miller); Brian Peeping Tom Wallace (Tony); Susan Travers (Lorraine); Maurice Durant (Public- ity chief); Brian Worth (Assistant director); Veronica Hurst (Miss Simpson); Miles Malleson (Elderly gentleman); Alan Rolfe (Store detective); Michael Powell (Mr. Lewis); John Dunbar. Publications Books: Gough-Yates, Kevin, Michael Powell, London, 1971. Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings, Cambridge, Massachu- setts, 1971. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England, London, 1971. Christie, Ian, editor, Powell, Pressburger, and Others, London, 1978. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of British Cinema, New York, 1978. Cosandey, Roland, editor, Retrospective: Powell and Pressburger, Locarno, 1982. Gottler, Fritz, and others, Living Cinema: Powell and Pressburger, Munich, 1982. Christie, Ian, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, 1985. Martini, Emanuela, editor, Powell and Pressburger, Bergamo, 1986. Powell, Michael, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography, London, 1986. Cintra Ferreira, Manuel, Michael Powell, Lisbon, 1992. Howard, James, Michael Powell, North Pomfret, 1996. Salwolke, Scott, The Films of Michael Powell and the Archers, Lanham, 1997. PEEPING TOM FILMS, 4 th EDITION 930 Articles: Green, O. O., ‘‘Michael Powell: Filmography,’’ in Movie (London), Autumn, 1965. Chamberlin, Phillip, in Film Society Review (London), January 1966. Gough-Yates, Kevin, ‘‘Private Madness and Public Lunacy,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1972. Collins, R., and Ian Christie, ‘‘Interview with Michael Powell: The Expense of Naturalism,’’ in Monogram (London), no. 3, 1972. Romer, J. C., in Ecran (Paris), July-August 1973. Renaud, Tristan, in Cinéma, (Paris), October 1976. Humphries, Reynold, ‘‘Peeping Tom: Voyeurism, the Camera, and the Spectator,’’ in Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 4, 1979. Stein, E., ‘‘A Very Tender Film, a Very Nice One: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-Octo- ber 1979. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times, 14 October 1979. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice, (New York), 15 October 1979. Sayre, N., in Nation (New York), 10 November 1979. Johnson, V., ‘‘Peeping Tom: A Second Look,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1980. McDonough, Maitland, ‘‘The Ambiguities of Seeing and Knowing in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,’’ in Film Psychology Review (New York), Summer-Fall 1980. Thomson, David, ‘‘Mark of the Red Death,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1980. Dubois, P., ‘‘Voir, la mort, ou l’effet-Méduse de la photographie au cinéma,’’ in Review Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), Summer 1983. Powell, Michael, ‘‘Leo Marks and Mark Lewis,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1983. Dumont, P., in Cinéma (Paris), January 1984. Revault D’Allonnes, F., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1984. Findley, J., in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1990. Morris, N. A., ‘‘Reflections on Peeping Tom,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1990. Bourget, E., ‘‘Colonel Blimp; Le voyeur,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 379, September 1992. Bick, Ilsa J., ‘‘The Sight of Difference,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth), no. 10, 1993. Redman, Nick, and Tomm Carrol, and Ted Elrick, ‘‘They’re Baaack: More Definitive Laser Versions,’’ in DGA Magazine (Los Ange- les), vol. 19, no. 5, October-November 1994. Strick, Philip, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 11, Novem- ber 1994. Wollen, Peter, ‘‘Dying for Art,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 12, December 1994. Schundt, T., ‘‘The Films of Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy,’’ in Delirious (Cleveland Heights), no. 4, 1995. Jivani, Alkarim, ‘‘Fantastic Voyeur,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1422, 19 November 1997. Massumi, B., ‘‘To Kill is Not Enough: Gender as Cruelty,’’ in Continuum, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997. Singer, James, ‘‘England’s Glamour Parade,’’ in Outré (Evanston), vol. 1, no. 7, 1997. Maslin, Janet, ‘‘Next to This, Norman Looks Sane,’’ in New York Times, 29 January 1999. *** Almost the most remarkable thing about Peeping Tom is the critical reception it provoked. This film, disingeniously described by its director Michael Powell as ‘‘a very tender film, a very nice one,’’ was uniformly abused in its own country. Derek Hill’s infamous claim that ‘‘the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer’’ may have been the most violent of critical assessments, but it was all too typical. Powell’s career as a feature-film director never recovered from the assault, and the road to critical re-assessment of Peeping Tom has been long and hard. Anyone concerned with the whys and wherefores of this process need look no further than Ian Christie (ed.) Powell Pressburger and Others, where the nature of the affront Powell offered to orthodox criticism is clearly analyzed. Peeping Tom was only the climactic case in a long series. None of this is to suggest, however, that Peeping Tom is not a disturbing movie. In narrative alone it is immediately problematic: any story about a man who murders women with the sharpened leg of a tripod, filming them as they die, is likely to attract adverse attention. When the young man in question is played straight, as someone with whom we are invited to empathise, and not as some rolling eyed gothic horror, then the difficulties are redoubled. How can we empathise with such perverse pleasures? And when the film-maker involved is such a well-established talent, how can we reconcile his presumed ‘‘seriousness’’ with what is conventionally the subject for a shocker? Today such difficulties would not be quite as pressing as they were in 1960. Ranges of acceptability have widened, and the line between Art and Exploitation is no longer so easily drawn. Yet even today Peeping Tom is genuinely disturbing. For all our familiarity with violent movie murder, with sexuality, with the psychology of perver- sion, Powell’s movie can still leave a spectator profoundly uneasy. For Peeping Tom refuses to let us off the hook after the fashion of so many horrific movies. Its elaborate structure of films within films implicates us as spectators in the voyeurism that fuels Mark’s violence. We see the murders through his viewfinder; later we see them on screen as he projects them for his pleasure. We see his father’s filmed record of experiments on the young Mark, experi- ments which have turned him into a voyeuristic killer. We see the movie studio where he works, the setting where he will murder (of all people) Moira Shearer, star of Powell’s The Red Shoes. As the internal cross-references multiply (and they are endless) the implica- tion insinuates itself into our awareness. In watching film, all film, the pleasures that we take are finally no different to Mark’s; the gap between his and our voyeurism is too small for comfort. It was Powell’s misfortune to make Peeping Tom at a time when commitment to a one-dimensional notion of realist cinema was at its height. Peeping Tom, like all of Powell’s cinema, is founded on a highly self-conscious manipulation of film itself, and it is impossi- ble here to do justice to the resonating visual complexity of films like A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and, of course, Peeping Tom. In this cinema it is the medium that is the source of pleasure and the focus of attention, not some instantly apparent moral ingredient. Peeping Tom turns that cinematic awareness back on itself, offering aesthetic satisfactions along with their disturbing implications. It is a film that is paramountly about cinema, about the experience of cinema, a film which makes voyeurs of us all. That is genuinely disturbing. —Andrew Tudor PéPé LE MOKOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 931 PéPé LE MOKO France, 1937 Director: Julien Duvivier Production: Paris Film Production; black and white, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes. Released 28 January 1937, Paris. Filmed in Pathe studios in Joinville, exteriors shot in Algiers, Marseille, and Sete. Producers: Robert and Raymond Hakim; screenplay: Julien Duvivier and d’Henri La Barthe (under pseudonym Detective Ashelbe) with Jacques Constant and Henri Jeanson, from the novel by Detective Ashelbe; photography: Jules Kruger and Marc Fossard; editor: Marguerite Beauge; sound: Antoine Archaimbaud; production de- signer: Jacques Krauss; music: Vincent Scotto and Mohamed Yguerbouchen. Cast: Jean Gabin (Pépé le Moko); Mireille Balin (Gaby Gould); Line Noro (Inès); Lucas Gridoux (Inspector Slimane); Gabriel Gabrio (Carlos); Fernand Charpin (Régis); Saturnin Fabre (Grandfather); Gilbert Gil (Pierrot); Roger Legris (Max); Gaston Modot (Jimmy); Marcel Dalio (L’Arbi); Frehel (Tania); Olga Lord (A?cha); Renee Carl (Mother Tarte); Rene Bergeron (Inspector Meunier); Charles Granval (Maxime Kleep); Philippe Richard (Inspector Janvier); Paul Escoffier (Commissioner Louvain); Robert Ozanne (Gendron); Georges Peclet (Barsac); Frank Maurice (An inspector). Publications Script: Duvivier, Julien, and Henri La Barthe, Pépé le Moko, in Avant-Scéne du Cinéma (Paris), 1 June 1981. Books: Gauteur, Claude, and André Bernard, Gabin; ou, Les Avatars d’un mythe, Paris, 1967. Chirat, Raymond, Julien Duvivier, Lyons, 1968. Anthologie du Cinéma 4, Paris, 1969. Sadoul, Georges, French Films, London, 1972. Missiaen, Jean-Claude, and Jacques Siclier, Paris, 1977. Milhaud, Sylvie, Jean Gabin, Paris, 1981. Brunelin, Andre, Gabin, Paris, 1987. Billard, Pierre, Julien Duvivier, Milan, 1996. Articles: Variety (New York), 24 March 1937. Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 23 April, 1937. Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1937. New York Times, 4 March 1941. Duvillars, Pierre, ‘‘Jean Gabin’s Instinctual Man,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1951. Aubriant, Michel, ‘‘Julien Duvivier,’’ in Cinémonde (Paris), 28 November 1952. Nolan, Jack, ‘‘Jean Gabin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1963. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Jean Gabin,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Febru- ary 1964. Renoir, Jean, ‘‘Duvivier, le professionel,’’ in Figaro Littéraire (Paris), 6 November 1967. Simsolo, No?l, in Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Vincendeau, Ginette, ‘‘Community, Nostalgia, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,’’ in Screen (London), November-December 1985. Garrity, H.A., ‘‘Narrative Space in Julien Duvivier’s, Pépé le Moko,’’ in French Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 1992. *** Pépé le Moko had an immediate success scarcely rivalled in French film history. Its director, Julien Duvivier, was instantly hired by Hollywood, where the film itself was remade the next year, with Anatole Litvak directing Charles Boyer, as Casbah. Pépé ranked as the year’s top film in many countries, including Japan, and it remains today a cult film of a stature similar to that which Casablanca enjoys in the United States. A chronicle of the adventures of a dandy criminal hiding out in the casbah section of Algiers, Pépé le Moko is really a film about the bitterness of lost dreams. Pépé, as created by Jean Gabin, is in no way captive of the outlaw life he leads. Controlling his minions by dint of his authoritative personality and the notoriety of his name, he is above them all. Only Sliman, the Algiers police inspector, has an inkling of the real man and his motives. Pépé’s gang is set off against the police force, while Pépé and Sliman struggle on a higher plane, respecting one another, respecting even more the fate that both believe rules them all. The film opens with documentary footage and informational commentary about the Casbah. We learn of the mixture of races, the numbers and kinds of vices represented in the maze of alleys even the police fear to enter. Pépé’s entrance is spectacular: a close-up of his hand holding a jewel, then his face tilted as he examines the jewel in the light. Soon after, while being pursued, he ducks into a secret hideaway and there encounters Gaby (Mireille Balin). Once again it is her jewels that attract both him and the camera in successive close-ups of their faces. When Sliman enters to escort Gaby back to the safety of the grand hotels, the knot is tied. Sliman even remarks, ‘‘It is written, Pépé.’’ Duvivier treats the entire intrigue as if with Sliman’s magistral comprehension. Never indulging in suspense, he nevertheless inflates key moments with an abundance of stylistic flourishes. Most famous is the death of the informer Regis at the hands of Pépé and his gang. Shoved back against a wall, hysterical and pathetic, Regis bumps into a jukebox, setting off a raucous song just as his own victim, aided by pals, pumps a revolver full of bullets into his thick body. Just before this scene Pépé and Gaby express their love by reciting antiphonally the Metro stops they know, moving through a remembered Paris from opposite ends until they say together ‘‘La Place Blanche.’’ Sliman looks on, knowing that he has caught Pépé in the net of desire and nostalgia. The Casbah will no longer serve as a refuge now that Gaby PERSONA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 932 Pépé le Moko and thoughts of Paris have corrupted Pépé. Later, in a moment of quiet just before the denouement, a homesick old singer, caught like Pépé in the Casbah, puts a record on the gramophone and, tears in her eyes, sings along with the record, a song about the glories of Paris. Duvivier pans along a wall from a picture of this woman when she was young and beautiful, to the record player, and then to the woman’s tear- choked face. It is a magnificent summation of the film’s ability to summon up unfulfilled desire and nostalgia. The film’s dynamic conclusion unrolls directly from these senti- ments: Pépé’s obligatory outburst against another informer (Marcel Dalio), his breaking away from his common-law wife, his descent from the Casbah—accompanied by the theme music of the film and a totally artificial rear-projection that places us inside his obsessed mind. Duvivier wrings all the pathos of the lost dream from the finale, as Pépé finds his way aboard Gaby’s ship and then is arrested inches away from her, though neither of them realizes how close they are. As the ship pulls out, he sees Gaby on the deck but the whistle of the ship drowns out his call. She is looking far above him, at the Casbah he has left. He tears his stomach open with a pocketknife. Virtually a private masturbation, his suicide is the climax of his longings, represented by the mysterious and elegant Gaby and by the memory of home. Both these sentiments and their outcome are of the style and spirit of poetic realism. One can see why the film was banned as demoralizing and debilitating first by the French government at the start of the war and then by the Vichy government once the new order had come to power. After the war it returned as a classic. —Dudley Andrew PERSONA Sweden, 1966 Director: Ingmar Bergman Production: AB Svensk Filmindustri; black and white, 35mm; running time 84 minutes; length: 2320 meters. Released 18 October 1966, Stockholm. Filmed 19 July 1965–17 September 1965, with some scenes shot in February and March 1966, in Svensk Filmindustri studios, Stockholm, and on location. PERSONAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 933 Producer: Ingmar Bergman; screenplay: Ingmar Bergman; photog- raphy: Sven Nykvist; editor: Ulla Ryghe; sound engineer: P. O. Pettersson; production designer: Bibi Lindstr?m; music: Lars- Johan Werle; special effects: Evald Andersson; costume design: Mago. Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alam); Liv Ullmann (Elisabeth Vogler); Margaretha Krook (L?karen); Gunner Bj?rnstrand (Herr Vogler); J?rgen Lindstr?m (The boy). Publications Script Bergman, Ingmar, Persona, Stockholm, 1966; translated as Persona in Persona and Shame, New York, 1972. Books: Sj?gren, Henrik, Ingmar Bergman p? teatern, Stockhom, 1968. Steene, Brigitte, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1968. Persona Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Wood, Robin, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Bj?rkman, Stig, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman, London, 1970. Sj?gren, Henrik, Regi: Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1970. Young, Vernon, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, New York, 1971. Simon, John, Ingmar Bergman Directs, New York, 1972. Ranieri, Tino, Ingmar Bergman, Florence, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart, editor, Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1975. Ullman, Liv, Changing, New York, 1976. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Ingmar Bergman and Society, San Diego, 1978. Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and the First Person Film, Princeton, 1978. Lange-Fuchs, Hauke, Der frühe Ingmar Bergman, Lübeck, 1978. Marion, Denis, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1979. Houston, Beverle, and Marsha Kinder, Self and Cinema: A Transformalist Perspective, New York, 1980. PERSONA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 934 Manvell, Roger, Ingmar Bergman: An Appreciation, New York, 1980. Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, Lon- don, 1981. Petric, Vlada, editor, Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, New York, 1981. Cowie, Peter, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York, 1982. Livingstone, Paisley, Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1982. Steene, Birgitta, A Reference Guide to Ingmar Bergman, Boston, 1982. Jones, G. William, editor, Talking with Ingmar Bergman, Dal- las, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1983. Eberwein, Robert T., Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting, Princeton, 1984. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham, North Carolina, 1986. Johns, Marilyn Blackwell, Persona: The Transcendent Image, Chi- cago, 1986. Jarvie, Ian, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthet- ics, London and New York, 1987. Bergman, Ingmar, Laterna Magica, Stockholm, 1987; as The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, London, 1988. Cohen, James, Through a Lens Darkly, New York, 1991. Bjorkman, Stig, and Torsten Maans, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Cambridge, 1993. Cohen, Hubert I., Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York, 1993. Long, Robert Emmet, Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage, New York, 1994. Tornqvist, Egil, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam, 1995. Blackwell, Marilyn J., Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Rochester, 1997. Michaels, Lloyd, editor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Cambridge, 1999. Articles: Macklin, F. A., in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1967. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 23 March 1967. Films in Review (New York), April 1967. Corliss, Richard, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1967. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 12 July 1967. Comolli, Jean-Louis, ‘‘The Phantom of Personality,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1967. Sontag, Susan, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1967. Leiser, Erwin, in Film Comment (New York), Fall-Winter 1967. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), December 1967. Harris, Michael, in Take One (Montreal), no. 8, 1967–68. Wood, Robin, in Movie (London), Spring 1968. Hofsess, John, in Take One (Montreal), August 1968. ‘‘Ingmar Bergman: jugé par deux critiques suédois,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1968. Bond, Kirk, in Film Culture (New York), Winter-Spring 1970. Young, Vernon, ‘‘Cinema Borealis,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Summer 1970. Jones, C. J., ‘‘Bergman’s Persona and the Artistic Dilemma of the Modern Narrative,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Mary- land), Winter 1977. Iverson, E., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1978. Campbell, P. N., ‘‘The Reflexive Function of Bergman’s Persona,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), no. 1, 1979. Scholar, N., ‘‘Anais Nin’s House of Incest and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona: Two Variations on a Theme,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1979. Casebier, Allan, ‘‘Reductionism Without Discontent: The Case of Wild Strawberries and Persona,’’ in Film Psychology Review (New York), Winter-Spring 1980. Boyd, D., ‘‘Persona and the Cinema of Interpretation,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1983–84. Barr, Alan P., ‘‘The Unravelling of Characters in Bergman’s Per- sona’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 15, no. 2, 1987. Bellour, R., ‘‘The Film Stilled,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington, Indiana), September 1990. Gul’chenko, V., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 8, 1991. Kirk, Caroline, in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 5, no. 10, June 1991. Sontag, S., ‘‘Tolshcha fil’ma,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 8, 1991. ‘‘Bergman, il paradosso di un ‘Ateo cristiano,’’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), November-December 1991. Wood, R., ‘‘Persona Revisited,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 34, 1994. Persson, G?ran, ‘‘Persona Psychoanalyzed: Bergman’s Persona: Rites of Spring as Chamber Play,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 40, May 1996. Lahr, John, ‘‘The Demon-Lover: After Six Decades in Film and Theatre, Ingmar Bergman Talks About His Family and the Inven- tion of Psychological Cinema,’’ in The New Yorker, vol. 75, no. 13, 31 May 1999. *** Persona may be Ingmar Bergman’s most consciously crafted film; it may also be one of his most enigmatic. The plot is a tour-de-force distillation of an agon between two women, Alma (Bibi Andersson), a young nurse, and Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman) her patient, a successful actress who has withdrawn into silence. The psychic tension between the two women, and the power of the silent one, reflect Strindberg’s short play The Stronger, a source many critics of the film have noted. Yet Bergman is even more daring than Strindberg, for more is at stake in his film, and he sustains the one-sided conversation for the length of the feature film. In many ways Persona is ‘‘about’’ the nature and conventions of the feature film—most obviously because Bergman begins the film by showing the ignition of an arc projector and the threading of a film, and ends it with the same projector being turned off. The greatest visual shock in all of Bergman’s often startling oeuvre must be the moment near the middle of Persona when the film rips (or seems to rip), burns, and introduces strange material, apparently foreign to the story of the two women. Actually, the material comes largely from a pre-title sequence. By the time Persona was made, the pre-title sequence had ceased to be a novelty and was on the way to becoming a tired convention. Generally, a pre-title sequence presents some bit of action prelimi- nary to the main action of the film, but not essential to its comprehen- sion. The pre-title sequence of Persona, however, is utterly unique. It THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 935 is composed of material completely foreign to the imagery of the film itself (except for the eruption after the burned film), so that one truly misses ‘‘nothing’’ of the plot by starting with the titles, yet it is crucial to an understanding of what is happening in that plot. Early in the film we see a psychiatrist who talks to Alma about her future patient, and who talks to Elisabeth, alone, about her with- drawal. Bergman uses the psychiatrist to fill us in on the background of the silent woman. Late in the film we meet Elisabeth’s husband, who may be blind, when he shows up on the island where his wife is recuperating—but apparently he cannot tell Alma from Elisabeth. By this time Bergman has laid so many clues about the imaginative or psychotic perspective of the plot that we must wonder whether the husband is himself imagined or indeed whether Alma and Elisabeth are two aspects of a divided personality. This suspicion is encouraged by a repeated shot of a composite face, made up of half of each woman’s face. It appears after a climactic scene in which Alma recites Elisabeth’s faults to her face and ends up screaming that she is not Elisabeth Vogler herself. Interpretation of the film must depend on how one regards that scene. Without judging the reality of any of the depicted events, however, once one sees the silent Elisabeth as a figure for the analyst and Alma as the patient, one can see that the sequence of the relationship between Alma and Elisabeth neatly corresponds to the stages of transference and counter-transference in classical psychoanalysis. Even more remarkable than the correspondence is the fact that Bergman has virtually suppressed shot-countershot in this film. This in itself is a considerable stylistic innovation for a film essentially about a single speaker and a single listener. But the few times that shot-countershot does occur, it underlines the stages of transference: first, when Alma initially makes contact with Elisabeth by reading her a letter from her husband; next, and with obsessive frequency, as Alma feels comfortable enough to describe her life and confess her excitement over an orgy and her subsequent abortion. Here shot- countershot underlines the positive transference: Alma is falling in love with Elisabeth. But when reading a private letter to Elisabeth’s husband, Alma realizes that she is being coolly analyzed and her love turns to hatred (negative transference). It is when she deliberately causes harm to Elisabeth that a single instance of shot-countershot occurs and, with it, comes the ripping and burning of the film, along with all the ‘‘repressed’’ material from the pre-title scene. The climactic accusation is the final shot-countershot scene in the film. It is repeated twice as if to stress its importance and to show how a film- maker constructs shot-countershot. As a psychoanalytic drama, Persona depends upon the relation- ship of the seemingly chaotic image of the beginning of the film to the accusations of Alma at the height of her transference anxiety. There the abortion, the rejection of Elisabeth’s son, and the confusion over who sleeps with her husband are significant issues as are the frequent representations and discussions of love-making while someone looks on. The entire film actually turns on the perspective of a pre- adolescent male, seen waking up in a morgue in the pre-title scene, and reaching out, in the first initial shot-countershot structure, to touch the projected image of the faces of the two women flowing together. In the center of this labyrinthine film, there is a primal scene disturbance: a fantasy of intercourse as a violent act, yet exciting to watch, in which the child born out of it believes himself unwanted, even the victim of a willed destruction. No film so systematically reflects the psychoanalytical encounter, although many films of lesser intensity (such as Hitchcock’s Spell- bound or Bergman’s own Face to Face) attempt it more directly; perhaps no other film offers as many decoys to hide its psychoanalyti- cal core. The very clues that would engage the viewer in trying to sort out what is real and what is imagined by the two (or is it one?) women are distractions from its profound concern. —P. Adams Sitney THE PHANTOM CHARIOT See K?RKALEN THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA USA, 1925 Director: Rupert Julian Production: Universal Pictures; black and white, (some sequences filmed in 2-strip Technicolor), 35mm. silent; running time: about 94 minutes; length: 10 reels, 8464 feet. Filmed in Hollywood. Cost: The Phantom of the Opera THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 936 budgeted at $1 million. Released 15 November 1925, premiered 6 September 1925 in New York. Re-released 1930 with some dialogue sequences and songs added. Presented by: Carl Laemmle; screenplay (adaptation): Raymond Schrock and Elliott J. Clawson, from the novel by Gaston Leroux; titles: Tom Reed; additional direction: Edward Sedgwick; photog- raphy: Virgil Miller, Milton Bridenbecker, and Charles Van Enger; editor: Maurice Pivar; production designers: Charles D. Hall, and Ben Carre. Cast: Lon Chaney (Erik); Mary Philbin (Christine Dace); Norman Kerry (Raoul de Chagny); Snitz Edwards (Florine Papillon); Gib- son Gowland (Simon); John Sainpolis (Philippe de Chagny); Vir- ginia Pearson (Carlotta); Arthur Edmond Carew (also Carewe) (Ledoux); Edith Yorke (Madame Valerius); Anton Vaverka (Prompter); Bernard Siegel (Joseph Buguet); Olive Ann Alcorn (La Sorelli); Edward Cecil (Faust); Alexander Bevani (Mephistopheles); John Miljan (Valentin); Grace Marvin (Martha); George Williams (Ricard); Bruce Covington (Moncharmin); Cesare Gravina (Manager); Ward Crane (Count Ruboff); Chester Conklin (Orderly); William Tryoler (Conductor). Publications Books: Clemens, Carlos, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, New York, 1967. Anderson, Robert G., Faces, Forms, Films: The Artistry of Lon Chaney, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1971. Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1974. Everson, William K., American Silent Film, New York, 1978. Riley, Philip, editor, MagicImage Filmbooks Presents the Making of the Phantom of the Opera, Absecon, New Jersey, 1994. Blake, Michael F., A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures, Lanham, 1995. Blake, Michael F., The Films of Lon Chaney, Lanham, 1998. Articles: Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 7 September 1925. Mitchell, George, ‘‘Lon Chaney,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1953. Behlmer, Rudy, in Films in Review (New York), October 1962. Bodeen, DeWitt, ‘‘Lon Chaney: Man of a Thousand Faces,’’ in Focus on Film (London), May-August 1970. Viviani, C., ‘‘Lon Chaney; ou, La Politique de l’acteur,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1978. Meth, S., ‘‘Reflections in a Cinema Eye: Lon Chaney,’’ in Classic Film Collector (Indiana, Pennsylvania), July 1979. Koszarski, R., ‘‘Career in Shadows,’’ in Film History (London), vol. 3, no. 3, 1989. MacQueen, S., ‘‘Phantom of the Opera—Part II,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), October 1989. Kindblom, M., ‘‘I begynnelsen var manniskan tre,’’ in Filmhaftet (Uppsala, Sweden), December 1989. Turner, George, ‘‘The Phantom’s Lady Returns,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Hollywood), vol. 71, no. 4, April 1990. MacQueen, S., ‘‘The 1926 Phantom of the Opera,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 70, September 1989. MacQueen, S., ‘‘Phantom of the Opera—Part II,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 70, October 1989. Pitman, J., ‘‘Chaney Phantom of the Opera Tinted and With Music Track, to Join the Current Craze,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 337, 25/31 October 1989. Weaver, T., ‘‘Silent Horror Classics: The Best of the Big Screen Shockers,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 25, February/March 1991. Télérama (Paris), no. 2380, 23 August 1995. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 494, September 1995. Blake, Michael F., ‘‘Lon Chaney’s Phantom Turns 70,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 52, September-October 1995. Blake, Michael F., ‘‘Lon Chaney Collection (1920–25),’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 52, September-October 1995. Correspondence on the various scores for the film, by Clifford McCarty, in Cue Sheet (Hollywood), vol. 11, no. 4, October 1995. Giddins, G., ‘‘The Mask,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 41, 23 January 1996. *** There have been several versions of The Phantom of the Opera, but none has remained as close to the original novel by Gaston Leroux as does the Lon Chaney film. Admittedly the film stays faithful to the original work sometimes more as a result of what is not shown than what is; for example, whereas later screen versions offer fanciful explanations for the phantom’s grotesque appearance, the Chaney feature makes no effort to explain why the phantom is the way he is— by default, presumably going along with Leroux’s story that he was ‘‘born that way.’’ Encouraged by the praise and box-office rewards heaped on Chaney’s previous Universal feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Carl Laemmle budgeted one million dollars for The Phantom of the Opera. Rupert Julian, a long-time Universal contract director who had made a career as an actor portraying Kaiser Wilhelm in various films, was assigned to direct, but he was replaced sometime during the shooting by Edward Sedgwick, a minor comedy director. (Apparently Julian and Chaney did not get along, the result of a disagreement about the phantom’s characterization.) Universal promoted the film by using the rather obvious device of permitting no advance photo- graphs of Chaney to be shown, thus assuring an excited and enthusias- tic audience for the New York premiere on September 6, 1925. Critical reaction was somewhat mixed, but the feature proved a tre- mendous success at the box office. It is perhaps unfortunate that The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera are the most frequently revived and easily accessible of Chaney’s silent features, for neither film allows the actor much excuse for dramatics. His make-up, of course, is superb, but here there is no evidence of the kind of emotional range that Chaney displays, for example, in Tell it to the Marines (1927). Also, his supporting players, Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, are singu- larly lacking in talent; Philbin, as the opera singer who unmasks the Phantom, is particularly weak. PHILADELPHIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 937 The star of The Phantom of the Opera is not Chaney, but rather the magnificent sets of Charles D. Hall and Ben Carre, ranging from the awe-inspiring lobby and auditorium of the Paris Opera House to the eerie, subterranean home of the phantom. Equally impressive are the costumes, particularly the ‘‘Death’’ garment worn by Chaney in the Bal Masque sequence. This scene, together with the operatic numbers from Gounod’s Faust, were filmed in two-strip Technicolor. The direction is weak, and the film is badly paced for a melodrama, although suspense is allowed to build, the result of Chaney’s remain- ing masked until more than half-way through the film. For a 1930 reissue of The Phantom, Universal filmed a number of dialogue sequences with Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, and added a singing voice—not that of Philbin—to the operatic numbers. At that time some ten minutes were also cut from the film. —Anthony Slide PHILADELPHIA USA, 1993 Director: Jonathan Demme Production: TriStar Pictures; colour, 35mm; sound; running time: 120 minutes. Filmed in Philadelphia, 1993. Producer: Edward Saxon, Jonathan Demme; screenplay: Ron Nyswaner; photography: Tak Fujimoto; editor: Craig McKay; assistant director: Ron Bozman, Drew Ann Rosenberg; production design: Kristi Zea; art director: Tim Galvin; music: Howard Shore; sound editor: Ron Bochar; sound recording: Chris Newman, Steve Scanlon. Cast: Tom Hanks (Andrew Beckett); Denzel Washington (Joe Miller); Jason Robards (Charles Wheeler); Mary Steenburgen (Belinda Conine); Antonio Banderas (Miguel Alvarez); Ron Vawter (Bob Seidman); Robert Ridgley (Walter Kenton); Charles Napier (Judge Garnett); Lisa Summerour (Lisa Miller); Joanne Woodward (Sarah Backett); Roberta Maxwell (Judge Tate); Roger Corman (Mr. Laird). Awards: Oscar for Best Actor (Hanks), 1993. Publications Books: Kael, Pauline, Pauline Kael on Jonathan Demme: A Selection of Reviews Accompanying the Retrospective Jonathan Demme, an American Director, Minneapolis, 1988. Bliss, Michael, and Christiana Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme, Carbondale, 1996. Falaschi, Francesco, Jonathan Demme, Milan, 1997. Articles: McCarthy, T., Variety (New York), 20 December 1993. Bruzzi, S., Sight and Sound (London), March 1994. Taubin, A., ‘‘The Odd Couple,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), March 1994. Mueller, Matt, ‘‘The Philadelphia Story,’’ in Empire (London), March 1994. Derrett, A., in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), no. 44, April 1994. Grundman, R., and P. Sacks, Cineaste (New York), No. 3, 1994. Pearson, H., Films in Review (New York), No. 3/4, 1994. Harty, K.J., ‘‘The Failures of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia’’ in Four Quarters (Philadelphia), Spring 1994. Stanbrook, Alan, Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 1994. Mechar, K.W., ‘‘‘Every Problem Has a Solution’: AIDS and the Cultural Recuperation of the American Nuclear Family in Jona- than Demme’s Philadelphia,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 15, no. 1, 1994. Cante, R., ‘‘A Report from Philadelphia and Somewhere Else,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 15, no. 2, 1995. Weis, E., ‘‘Sync Tanks,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 21, no. 1/2 1995. Sandler, A., ‘‘Philadelphia Suit Near Accord,’’ in Variety (New York), 12/18 February 1996. Evans, G., ‘‘Philadelphia Story Raises Muddy Issues in Filmmaking,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 362, 18/24 March 1996. Evans, G., and A. Sandler, ‘‘TriStar Settles Philadelphia Suit,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 362, 25/31 March 1996. Van Fuqua, Joy, ‘‘‘Can You Feel It, Joe?’: Male Melodrama and the Family Man,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Austin), no. 38, Fall 1996. Kenny, Glenn, ‘‘Jonathan Demme,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 12, no. 3, November 1998. *** Knowing old heads around Hollywood shook with dismay when Jonathan Demme revealed his plan to follow up the surprisingly successful The Silence of the Lambs with another of the risky ventures he was noted for, a major production featuring homosexuality and AIDS. Films about homosexuality (since a revision in the Production Code in 1969 made the word even mentionable in films), from the camp The Gay Deceivers (1969) to the James Ivory/Ismail Merchant adaptation of E.M. Forster’s long suppressed novel Maurice (1986), had never done well at the box office. Films dealing with AIDS, such as Longtime Companion, had played to small audiences on the small art theatre circuit. It can be argued that the cinema is developing a new, more mature audience as Philadelphia was a financial and critical success in a year that saw Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Ivory/Merchant’s Remains of the Day. Nor did Philadelphia stir up as much controversy as nervous exhibitors had feared from protesting religious fundamentalists and other reactionary lobbies. Probably these pressure groups had given up any hope for an industry that wallowed in decadence and indecency. Surprisingly most objec- tions to the film came from the expanding gay press that thought Demme should have taken a more militant line demanding action to conquer AIDS, the modern plague. Tom Hanks, who won the 1993 Academy Award for best actor for his extraordinarily demanding performance as AIDS victim Andrew Beckett, acknowledged this protest and explained to interviewer David Thomson: THE PHILADELPHIA STORY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 938 I think it’s all very legitimate criticism . . . I’m not surprised at all that . . . anybody who is part of that aspect of the gay community that is, what? Counter- culture or whatever. What they wanted was something that was going to represent their lives. Philadelphia didn’t do that.... But past that, you have to say, yes, that’s true, but look what the movie is for what it is, not what it is not. The storyline is for the most part straightforward. The mise-en- scène is, with one startling exception, as naturalistic as possible, especially in colour. An outstandingly promising and personable young lawyer is entrusted with a top assignment by the most promi- nent and respected law firm in the city. (Viewers may wonder why Philadelphia, not particularly prominent in the AIDS crisis, was chosen as the setting. The city has a traditional reputation in the United States for producing the sharpest lawyers, trained, like Beckett, at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.) The firm claims that he has been dismissed for inefficiency and failure to live up to his promise; but he claims that he was fired when they discovered he had AIDS, and he sues on the grounds that it is against the law to fire an individual for a disability that does not prevent the fulfillment of his or her duties. No other lawyer, however, is willing to oppose the powerful firm until Beckett breaks through the prejudices of a former adversary, struggling black lawyer Joe Miller, who wins the case. Justice is done in legalistic terms, but everyone loses. Beckett dies shortly after the jury decides in his favour; the old law firm loses a good deal of money and some of its long-cherished reputation; the Beckett family loses a brilliant son; and the future of Joe Miller and of Beckett’s Hispanic-American lover do not appear promising despite their immediate financial rewards. The film is not about AIDS as a social and political problem. It uses the enormous present concern over the epidemic as a means to an end in broaching a far larger, timeless problem. The issue that concerns the filmmakers is based upon a distinction that has been crucially central to the American protest movements—whether this is a nation based upon people or upon law, as Andrew Beckett makes clear when he justifies his suit by explaining, ‘‘I love the law, to see justice done.’’ The film is a very rare example of the oldest form of drama in the European tradition, classical tragedy in a medium that has been almost entirely exploited by melodrama. So far the most substantial and challenging reservations about the film have been directed at the sudden change three-quarters of the way through, from the neutral naturalism of the visual image to an unprecedented surrealistic sequence during an interview between Beckett and Joe Miller, his attorney. Miller has been trying to keep his client’s mind on the testimony that he will give the next day; but Beckett becomes evasive and puts on a recording of Maria Callas singing the aria ‘‘La Momma Morta’’ from Umberto Giordano’s opera André Chénier. The screen is suffused with a demonic red glow as a smouldering fireplace blazes forth, symbolizing the passionate fire burning in Beckett. The producers tried to cut this episode, and many reviewers have found it irrelevant and fatuous; but Demme and Hanks fought to retain it, even though its significance has been generally misunderstood. Typical of the bewildered reaction is Alan Stanbrook’s comment in The Sunday Telegraph that ‘‘many will wince at the embarrassing scene where Hanks tries to explain what opera means to gays.’’ As Hanks stressed in this interview, the film does not attempt to represent some collective psyche of the gay community. The episode is a strictly personal statement, as he moves from routine questions about the litigation into the vision that explains his sometimes inscrutable behaviour, when Beckett speaks for himself as an ‘‘ad- venturous spirit,’’ declaiming histrionically over the soaring music: ‘‘I am divine. I am oblivious. I am the god come down from the heavens to earth to make of earth a heaven.’’ This reference to divinity establishes the link between classic tragedy and the film. Whether intentionally or not, scriptwriter Roy Nyswaner echoes the myth of Philocetes, a great bowman, who is banished during the Trojan War by his fellow Greeks to a deserted island when a snakebite gives him a noxious and incurable wound; but they must bring him back as a seer decrees that Troy can only be taken with his bow and arrows. Philocetes comes to a happier end than Andrew Beckett, but their relationship is highlighted by one of the key lines in the film as the jury playing the role of the classic chorus decides that when the firm gave Beckett the big assignment, they were sending in not a disappointing employee, but their ‘‘top gun.’’ Even more pervasive as a subtext throughout the film is the myth of Icarus, the son of the ingenious Daedulus, who made the men wax wings with which to fly out of the labyrinth where they were imprisoned. Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax melted, so that he fell to his death in the sea. Andrew Beckett is another ‘‘adventurous spirit’’ who has flown too high and taken too many risks. In the surrealist opera episode, viewers are presented a glimpse beneath the quotidian reality of the legal proceedings into the inner vision of Andrew Beckett, who is motivated by a principle that David Thomson finds at work in some of Hank’s other films, that ‘‘Fantasy soars above any hope of duty or intelligence.’’ Beckett is brilliant, seeking to end injustice and make a heaven on earth; but he is also oblivious to dangerous risks in his pursuit of the ideal. This complex and still puzzling film shows the possibilities rarely realized so far of using the cinema to update classic myths as they have been used in the past in literature to probe our present condition. —Warren French THE PHILADELPHIA STORY USA, 1940 Director: George Cukor Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 112 minutes. Released December 1940. Filmed 1940 MGM studios. Producer: Joseph Mankiewicz; screenplay: Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt (uncredited), from the play by Philip Barry; photog- raphy: Joseph Ruttenberg; editor: Frank Sullivan; sound: Douglas Shearer; set decorator: Edwin Willis; art directors: Cedric Gibbons and Wade B. Rubottom; music: Franz Waxman; costume de- signer: Adrian. THE PHILADELPHIA STORYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 939 The Philadelphia Story Cast: Katharine Hepburn (Tracy Lord); Cary Grant (C. K. Dexter Haven); James Stewart (Macauley Connor); Ruth Hussey (Liz Imbrie); John Howard (George Kittredge); Roland Young (Uncle Willie); John Halliday (Seth Lord); Virginia Weidler (Dinah Lord); Mary Nash (Margaret Lord); Henry Daniell (Sidney Kidd); Lionel Pape (Edward); Rex Evans (Thomas); Russ Clark (John); Hilda Plowright (Librarian); Lita Chevret (Manicurist); Lee Phelps (Bartender); Dorothy Fay, Florine McKinney, Helene Whitney, and Hillary Brooks (Mainliners); Claude King (Uncle Willie’s butler); Robert de Bruce (Dr. Parsons); Veda Buckland (Elsie). Awards: Oscars for Best Actor (Stewart) and Best Screenplay, 1940; New York Film Critics Award, Best Actress (Hepburn), 1940. Publications Books: Langlois, Henri, and others, Hommage à George Cukor, Paris, 1963. Domarchi, Jean, George Cukor, Paris, 1965. Cary, Grant, Cukor and Company: The Films of George Cukor and His Collaborators, New York, 1971. Dickens, Homer, The Films of Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1971. Lambert, Gavin, On Cukor, New York, 1972. Marill, Alvin H., Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1973. Clarens, Carlos, George Cukor, London, 1976. Deschner, Donald, The Films of Cary Grant, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1978. Pomerance, Diane Linda, The Cinematic Style of George Cukor in the Comedy of Manners Films ‘‘Holiday’’ and ‘‘The Philadelphia Story’’: A Comparative Study, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980. Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981. Phillips, Gene D., George Cukor, Boston, 1982. Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, Newcastle- upon-Tyne, 1983. Carey, Gary, Katharine Hepburn: A Biography, London, 1983. Schickel, Richard, Cary Grant: A Celebration, London, 1983. Britton, Andrew, Katharine Hepburn: The Thirties and After, New- castle-upon-Tyne, 1984. Eyles, Allen, James Stewart, London, 1984. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 940 Morley, Sheridan, Katharine Hepburn: A Celebration, London, 1984. Bernadoni, James, George Cukor: A Critical Study and Filmography, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1985. Hunter, Allan, James Stewart, New York, 1985. Higham, Charles, and Ray Moseley, Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, New York, 1989. McGilligan, Patrick, George Cukor: A Double Life: A Biography of the Gentleman Director, New York, 1992. Levy, Emanuel, George Cukor: Master of Elegance: Hollywood’s Legendary Director and His Stars, New York, 1994. Ryan, Joal, Katherine Hepburn: A Stylish Life, New York, 1999. Schickel, Richard, Cary Grant, New York, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 27 November 1940. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 13 December 1940. New York Times, 27 December 1940. The Times (London), 3 March 1941. Tozzi, Romano V., ‘‘Katharine Hepburn,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1957. Tozzi, Romano V., ‘‘George Cukor: His Success Directing Women Has Obscured His Other Directional Virtues,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1958. Reid, John, ‘‘So He Became a Lady’s Man,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1960. Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), July 1962. Bureau, Patrick, ‘‘Un Etincelant Cukor,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 1 November 1962. Fieschi, Jean-André, ‘‘Ou finit le théatre?,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1963. Philippe, Claude Jean, ‘‘Analyse d’un grand film: Philadelphia Story,’’ in Télérama (Paris), 8 December 1963. ‘‘Rétrospective Cukor,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1964. Sweigart, William, ‘‘James Stewart,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1964. Nightingale, B., ‘‘After Making Nine Films Together, Hepburn Can Practically Direct Cukor,’’ in New York Times, 28 January 1979. Phillips, Gene D., ‘‘Cukor and Hepburn,’’ in American Classic Screen (Shawnee Mission, Kansas), Fall 1979. Bodeen, DeWitt, ‘‘George Cukor,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1981. Le Pavec, J.-P., in Cinéma (Paris), March 1982. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), May 1985. Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Fall 1985. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 4, 1990. Shumway, D. R., ‘‘Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 4, 1991. Rosterman, R., in Hollywood: Then and Now (Studio City), vol. 24, no. 6, 1991. Viviani, Christian, ‘‘Katharine Hepburn et George Cukor,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 425–426, July-August 1996. *** The Philadelphia Story is one of the most successful and best loved screwball comedies of the classical Hollywood era. It is based on the 1939 Broadway production of Philip Barry’s play which starred Katharine Hepburn. The film employs the 1930s screwball plot device of the idle rich whose wealth has blinded them to the simple joys of life and the worthiness of middle-class values. Tracy Lord is the arrogant Philadelphia socialite who is planning her wedding to a stuffy social climber when her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, arrives at the mansion. Haven is a charming millionaire who openly displays his love of life and his disdain of pretentiousness while he secretly longs for the reunion with his ex-wife. Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey are the reporters from the scandal sheet Spy Magazine who have been assigned to cover the wedding. Anti- romance, verbal and witty relationships, and the tendency to poke fun at the rich are all in abundance providing humorous distractions and obstacles to Tracy’s and Dexter’s final reconciliation. Director George Cukor here shows his preference for understate- ment in romantic comedies through his emphasis on plot and perform- ance. Following Frank Capra’s example in It Happened One Night and his earlier success Holiday, Cukor employs a screwball comic style which avoids explicit romance between two leading characters. He instead pits them against each other, creating romantic courtship through character tensions. Because the audience knows that the characters are Hepburn and Grant, two movie stars who have been paired before in Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett and Holiday and Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, the audience is predisposed to want them to get together. Cukor plays with this expectation throughout the film but especially in the famous opening scene: Grant is tossed out the front door; Hepburn appears at the door where she breaks one of Grant’s golf clubs; she tosses the clubs after him and slams the door; Grant returns to the door and rings the bell; when Hepburn answers, he pushes her in the face. Not a single word is spoken in this scene. Its comic success depends as much on Hepburn’s star image as on the superb timing. During the latter 1930s, Hepburn headed the list by the Independent Theatre Owners Association of ‘‘box-office poison’’ movie stars. Critics found her grating, ‘‘mannish,’’ or too intense. Cukor, who had directed Hepburn in five previous films, said that she was unattractive to audiences in the late 1930s because she ‘‘never was a ‘love me. I’m a lovable little girl’ kind of actress. She always challenged the audience, and . . . they felt something arrogant in her playing.’’ In The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Cukor capitalized on these aspects of her image, turning them to Hepburn’s advantage by establishing Tracy as a haughty, inflexible snob who becomes lovable when she exposes her underlying vulnerability and fragility. The Philadelphia Story broke attendance records at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The critical and popular success of the film was especially sweet to Hepburn, who had selected the film as a vehicle for her return to movies after a two year hiatus. After Holiday and Bringing Up Baby had brought her additional negative reviews, she angrily left Hollywood. Hepburn vowed to return only if the role and circumstances were right. The Tracy Lord character in The Philadelphia Story not only provided the right role, but it afforded Hepburn the opportunity to create the right circumstances. During her Broadway stint in the play, she acquired the movie rights which she then sold to MGM in a deal that guaranteed her the movie role of Tracy Lord and choice of director and co-stars. The Philadelphia Story’s success led to its remake as a film musical in 1956. Though High Society features music and lyrics by THE PIANOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 941 Cole Porter and stars Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly, it lacks the sparkle and comic tautness of the original. —Lauren Rabinovitz THE PIANO Australia, 1993 Director: Jane Campion Production: Jan Chapman Productions, in association with CIBY 2000; Eastmancolour, 35mm; running time: 120 minutes. Filmed in New Zealand, 1992. Producer: Jan Chapman; screenplay: Jane Campion; photography: Stuart Dryburgh; editor: Veronica Jenet; assistant director: Mark Turnbull, Victoria Hardy, Charles Haskell, and Therese Mangos; production design: Andrew McAlpine; music: Michael Nyman; sound editor: Gary O’Grady and Jeanine Chialvo; sound recording: Tony Johnson, Gethin Creagh, and Michael J. Dutton; costumes: Janet Patterson. Cast: Holly Hunter (Ada); Harvey Keitel (Baines); Sam Neill (Stew- art); Anna Paquin (Flora); Kerry Walker (Aunt Morag); Genevieve Lemon (Nessie); Tungia Baker (Hira); Ian Mune (Reverend). The Piano Awards: Palme d’or and Best Actress, Cannes 1993; Oscars for Best Actress (Hunter), Best Supporting Actress (Paquin), and Best Origi- nal Screenplay, 1993. Publications Script: Campion, Jane, The Piano, London, 1994. Books: Gatti, Ilaria, Jane Campion, Recco, 1998. Wexman, Virginia W., editor, Jane Campion: Interviews, Jack- son, 1999. Caputo, Raffaele, and Geoff Burton, Second Take: Australian Film- Makers Talk, Sydney, 2000. Margolis, Harriet, editor, Jane Campion’s The Piano, New York, 2000. Articles: Stratton, D., Variety (New York), 10 May 1993. Bilbrough, M., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), May 1993. Bourgignon, T., and others, Positif (Paris), May 1993. Strauss, F., and others, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1993. Ciment, M., and T. Bourgignon, Positif (Paris), June 1993. Dumas, D., Avant-Scène (Montreal), July 1993. Bruzzi, Stella, ‘‘Bodyscape,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Octo- ber 1993. Younis, R., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), October 1993. Francke, L., Sight and Sound (London), November 1993. Eggleton, D., ‘‘Grimm Fairytale of the South Seas,’’ in Illusions (Wellington), Winter 1993. Hardy, Ann, ‘‘The Last Patriarch,’’ in Illusions (Wellington), Win- ter 1993. Greenberg, H., Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1994. Pearson, H., Films in Review (New York), no. 3/4, 1994. Quart, B., Cineaste (New York), no. 3, 1994. Riley, V., ‘‘Ancestor Worship: The Earthly Paradise of Jane Campion’s Universe,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 102, 1995. Bell, P., ‘‘All That Patriarchy Allows: The Melodrama of The Piano,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 102, 1995. Bruzzi, Stella, and Lynda Dyson, and Sue Gillett, ‘‘Tempestuous Petticoats: Costume and Desire in The Piano/ The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano/ Lips and Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano,’’ in Screen (Ox- ford), vol. 36, no. 3, Autumn 1995. Campbell, Russell, ‘‘Dismembering the Kiwi Bloke: Representations of Masculinity in Braindead, Desperate Remedies, and The Piano,’’ in Illusions (Wellington), no. 24, Spring 1995. Cleave, Peter, ‘‘Old New Zealand, New New Zealand,’’ in Illusions (Wellington), no. 24, Spring 1995. Gordon, Suzy, ‘‘‘I Clipped Your Wings, That’s All’: Auto-Erotism and the Female Spectator in The Piano Debate,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 37, no. 2, Summer 1996. PICKPOCKET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 942 Payette, P., ‘‘The Piano as Maternal Melodrama,’’ in Michigan Academician vol. 28, no. 3, 1996. Siskel, Gene, ‘‘Ms. Campion’s Opus,’’ in TV Guide, vol. 45, no. 13, 29 March 1997. Chumo, Peter N., ‘‘Keys to the Imagination: Jane Campion’s The Piano,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 25, no.3, July 1997. Dapkus, Jeanne R., ‘‘Sloughing off the Burdens: Ada’s and Isa- bel’s Parallel/Antithetical Quests for Self-Actualization in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Henry James’s Novel The Portrait of a Lady,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 25, no. 3, July 1997. Goldson, Annie, ‘‘Piano Recital,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 38, no. 3, Autumn 1997. Perkins, R., ‘‘Imag(in)ing Our Colonial Past: Colonial New Zealand on Film from The Birth of New Zealand to The Piano-Part II,’’ in Illusions (Wellington), no. 26, Winter 1997. Hendershot, Cyndy, and Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘‘(Re)visioning the Gothic: Jane Campion’s The Piano/‘Silence, Sex, and Feminism: An Examination of The Piano’s Unacknowledged Sources,’’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 2, April 1998. Combs, R., ‘‘Boxing Ada,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 113/114, 1998. *** Set in the 1800s, Jane Campion’s The Piano is a tale of repression and sensuality. Ada (Holly Hunter) is a mute, who goes to New Zealand, with her nine-year-old daughter to marry a man she has never met; essentially sold off by her father, Ada leaves Scotland for the wilderness and beauty of a new country. She comes to the country completely unprepared for her new life and armed only with her most beloved possessions: her daughter and her piano. Music is Ada’s way of communicating. She puts all of her repressed passion and sexuality into her piano playing. When her new husband Stewart (Sam Neill) refuses to bring the piano up to his house, Baines (Harvey Keitel), a man who has reportedly ‘‘gone native,’’ buys the instrument and asks Ada to teach him how to play it. He trades her the piano one key at a time in return for sexual favours. Although initially disgusted and shocked by Baines’s forwardness, when he finally gives her the piano, Ada goes to him and allows him to make passionate love to her. The film portrays the absurdity of transferring the social niceties of Western society onto a wild and unknown environment. The rigidity of the European way of life is contrasted with the freedom of the native Maori culture—and the aboriginals silent contempt and sardonic humour at the expense of Western culture. When Stewart learns that Ada is sleeping with Baines, his re- sponse is unexpected and shocking. During Stewart’s violent out- burst, the audience thinks that his anger will be directed towards the piano—the symbol of Ada’s hidden self—and is shocked and stunned when Stewart drags Ada out of their house and chops her finger off. This is the first expression of his feelings that Stewart has shown— illustrating that under his extremely constrained exterior he is a hot- bed of seething passions. After Stewart confronts Baines, in a scene reminiscent of the opening one in which Ada arrives on the island, Ada and her daughter leave the island with Baines—the piano strapped to the fragile boat. When the piano is thrown into the ocean to lighten the vessel’s load, Ada purposely entangles her foot in a rope connected to the piano and plunges to a watery grave. Strapped to the piano Ada begins her long descent into the depths of the sea, but she struggles free and rises to the surface. Thus the piano, the symbol of her expression and repression, is no longer needed. Ada has liberated herself. Ada is a wilful, stubborn character. Half adult, half child, she combines an iron will with a deep and passionate nature. She has been mute since the age of six, for no apparent reason other than she simply does not wish to speak—she has retreated into a world in which the piano is her only friend and only source of expression. In the end it is ironic that it is the piano, or a part of it, which betrays her. She writes a message on one of the keys and gives it to her daughter to give to Baines. Flora, her daughter, gives it to Stewart instead, beginning the chain of tragic events which result in her mother’s disfigurement. Yet in a sense, Ada’s choice to withdraw into herself, to keep her voice inside her head, is also about control. She is a woman existing in a patriarchal society—who has no rights, even over herself. She is sold off by her father to Stewart, and is forced to go to a completely new world because of her sex. In choosing not to speak, Ada is exercising control over one of the few things left for her to control. Stewart and Baines are contrasting images of masculinity and of European culture. While Stewart is tied to managing his female family, and his European social customs despite the inappropriate- ness of his behavior, Baines is dissolute and lewd. He consorts with the natives and lives a comparatively wild and lascivious life. While Stewart and his family are buttoned-up tightly in their oppressive clothes, Baines is seen naked, or dressed in stained, sweaty clothes. Campion’s The Piano is a superbly filmed piece of cinema. The scope and composition of the cinematography allows the viewer to witness New Zealand through Ada’s eyes. The heat and oppressive- ness of the climate and landscape are mirrored in the restrictiveness of Ada’s apparel. As Ada gives in to passion and frees herself from her society’s rules, she loosens her ties to the piano, and to her former silent self. At the end of the film, Ada is slowly shaping words, showing that she is rebuilding her world. —A. Pillai PICKPOCKET France, 1959 Director: Robert Bresson Production: Lux Films: black and white, 35mm; running time 75 minutes. Released 1959. Producer: Agnès Delahaie; screenplay: Robert Bresson; photogra- phy: L. H. Burel; editor: Raymond Lamy; sound engineer: Antoine Archimbault; production designer: Pierre Charbonnier; music: Lully. Cast: Martin Lassalle (Michel); Marika Green (Jeanne); Pierre Leymarie (Jacques); Jean Pelegri (Instructor); Kassigi (Initiator); Pierre Etaix (2nd accomplice); Mme. Scal (Mother). PICKPOCKETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 943 Pickpocket Publications Books: 5 reviewers, The Films of Robert Bresson, New York, 1969. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946, vol. 1, New York, 1970. Cameron, Ian, The Films of Robert Bresson, London, 1970. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style on Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Los Angeles, 1972. Pontes Leca, C. de, Robert Bresson o cinematografo e o sinal, Lisbon, 1978. Estève, Michel, Robert Bresson: La passion du cinématographe, Paris, 1983. Sloan, Jane, Robert Bresson: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1983. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, London, 1985. Arnaud, Philippe, Robert Bresson, Paris, 1986. Hanlon, Lindley, Fragments: Bresson’s Film Style, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1986. Guerrini, Loretta, Discorso per una lettura di L’argent di Bresson, Rome, 1992. Articles: Green, Marjorie, ‘‘Robert Bresson,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1960. Sontag. Susan, ‘‘Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,’’ in Seventh Art (New York), Summer 1964. Skoller, Donald S., ‘‘Praxis as a Cinematic Principle in the Films of Robert Bresson,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1969. Armes, Roy, ‘‘The Art of Robert Bresson,’’ in London Magazine, October 1970. Prokosch, M., ‘‘Bresson’s Stylistics Revisited,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 15, no. 1, 1972. Polhemusin, H. M., ‘‘Matter and Spirit in the Films of Robert Bresson,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1974. Prédal, R., ‘‘Léonce H. Burel’’ (interview), in Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1974. Westerbeck, Colin, Jr., ‘‘Robert Bresson’s Austere Vision,’’ in Artforum (New York), November 1976. Bensard, Patrick, ‘‘Notes sur Pickpocket,’’ in Camera/Stylo (Paris), January 1985. Predal, R., in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January-February 1992. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK FILMS, 4 th EDITION 944 Schrader, Paul, ‘‘Pickpocket de Bresson,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Audé, Fran?oise, and Louis Malle, and Michel Ciment, ‘‘Louis Malle,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 419, January 1996. Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 465, October 1996. Dick, Jeff T., in Library Journal, vol. 123, no. 5., 15 March 1998. Durgnat, Raymond, in Film Comment (New York), vol. 35, no. 3, May 1999. *** Pickpocket, made in 1959 by Robert Bresson, was not considered a ‘‘New Wave’’ film because it did not deal with the problems of what Jean-Luc Godard termed ‘‘psychological realism.’’ Pickpocket did not address the then burgeoning question of cinematic reality, whether this status must be assigned according to the perception of reality or in terms of its impression. In fact, contrary to the expanding discipline of semiotics during the late 1950s and early 1960s Pickpocket was so sufficiently depersonalized and unrealistic as to avoid being regarded as an example of a film that articulated the way in which film was a ‘‘language system.’’ The filmmakers of this genre (as it is now recognized) were concerned with the deconstruction of the ‘‘Holly- wood’’ fiction film and its idiosyncratic stylization of cinematic reality. Bresson was not attempting to contribute cinematically to the ideological canons of the period. Instead, he was interested in exploring themes of redemption, a bourgeois preoccupation that did not coincide with New Wave theories of ‘‘distancing’’ and ‘‘unrealization.’’ In elucidating the ‘‘road to redemption’’ in Pick- pocket, Bresson employs the devices of ellipsis and temporal disten- tion. Close-ups of objects and actions are incriminating and clinical. He fragments the body frequently, compartmentalizing the parts shown into tight, claustrophobic realms of desire. One senses Michel’s compulsion to ‘‘fill up’’ some kind of void; there is a relentless but carefully repressed feeling of urgency in the film to experience a wholeness. With each theft that he both approaches and moves further away from this unrecognized (until the last moment of the film) spiritual yearning. It is the action of the crime itself that interests both the character Michel and director Bresson, rather than the material gains and narative consequences it may bring. In order that we clearly see the acts of ‘‘adding and subtracting’’ themselves, Bresson deftly shadows the movements of hands and eyes with his camera. At the moment of transference, i.e., when the money or the object ceases being owned by the ‘‘victim,’’ the shot of this precarious exchange is held for a few ‘‘long’’ seconds. The distention of this moment denies verisimilitude to the representation of the theft and serves to call it to our attention on a symbolic level. It is at this level that the viewer comes closest, through the metaphoric use of temporal distortion and fragmentation, to grasping the apostatic lengths to which Michel is blindly going, that his emptied soul might find redemption. Pickpocket proves to be an excellent filmic discourse on the boundaries and rules of bourgeois perception. Space is repeatedly compartmentalized in the film, being marked out more and more constrictively as the main character becomes further dependent upon the illusionary efficacy of his displaced desire. Bresson reverses the denotational treatment of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ space. The door to Michel’s room has no lock or any kind of securing device, so throughout the film it remains ajar. Since western audiences are culturally attuned to the properties of bourgeois space and are accustomed to seeing them observed, it is disconcerting to accept the existence of this unguarded, undefined space. Conversely, Bresson focuses without scruple on the scenes and bare moments of the crimes, thereby reconsolidating public space as private. The human eye can not objectively see a crime being committed. Instead, it perceives the act as it has been sedimented informationally through the media. Thus, television cameras have taken over the task. On film, the action of the crime is meta- communicated by its image. This image of the forbidden act is already motivated in terms of its signifying historicity. In Pickpocket, the functional status of this meta-communicated image is that of a palimpsest, allowing the viewer to see it as a diegetic trace. It shows but does not interpret or explain the main character’s movements in the story. Further, this trace, insofar as it does not presuppose a narrative closure, re-posits the primordial status of pre-bourgeois, unassigned space. In terms of discovering the reason why Michel steals, Bresson intends that it be attributed anagogically, rather than accessible through scientific analysis. —Sandra L. Beck PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK Australia, 1979 Director: Peter Weir Production: South Australian Film Corporation and the Australian Film Commission; 35 mm; running time: 115 minutes. Filmed on location at Hanging Rock, Victoria, Australia. Producers: James McElroy and Hal McElroy; screenplay: Cliff Green, based on the novel Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay; photography: Russell Boyd; editor: Max Lemon; art director: David Copping; music: Bruce Smeaton; costume designer: Judy Dorsman. Cast: Rachel Roberts (Mrs. Appleyard); Dominic Guard (Michael Fitzhubert); Helen Morse (Dianne de Poitiers); Jacki Weaver (Minnie); Vivean Gray (Miss MacCraw); Kirsty Child (Dora Lumley); Annie Lambert (Miranda); Karen Robinson (Irma); John Jarratt (Albert); Margaret Nelsonn (Sara). Publications Books: Haltof, Marek, Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide, New York, 1996. Rayner, Jonathan, The Films of Peter Weir, London, 1998. Bliss, Michael, Dreams Within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir, Carbondale, 2000. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCKFILMS, 4 th EDITION 945 Picnic at Hanging Rock Articles: Purdon, N., ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Notes Towards the Australian Cinema,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbournes), November-Decem- ber 1975. Hunter, I., ‘‘Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock,” in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), March-April 1976. Murray, S. and A. I. Ginnane, ‘‘Producing Picnic,” in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), March-April 1976. O’Donnell, V., ‘‘Max Lemon: Out of the Woodwork,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), June-July 1976. Positif (Paris), July-August 1976. Wertenstein, W., ‘‘Niewyjasniona tajemnica,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), May 1977. Bonneville, L., ‘‘Pique-nique a Hanging Rock,’’ Séquences (Montr- eal), January 1978. Cult Movies, number 2, 1979. Nation (New York), 17 March 1979. Time (New York), 23 April 1979. New Australian Cinema, 1979. McFarlane, B., ‘‘The Films of Peter Weir,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), April-May 1980. Ledgard, R., in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), May 1982. Jankus, M., ‘‘Piknik pod Wiszaca Skala,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), April 1984. Kindblom, M., ‘‘Stillbilden,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), no. 6, 1988. McFarlane, B., ‘‘The Australian Literary Adaptation: An Overview,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 21, no. 2, 1993. Elia, Maurice, in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 181, November- December 1995. Nichols, Peter M., ‘‘In Peter Weir’s Whodunit, an Otherworldly Force Did: The Director Has Moved On, but His Riddle of the Lost Girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock Endures,’’ in New York Times, 1 November 1998. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, and others, ‘‘Peter Weir,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 453, November 1998. Tibbetts, John C., ‘‘Adaptation Redux: Hanging Rock on Video,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 27, no. 2, April 1999. *** At a time when New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote were experimenting with true stories told through fictional techniques, Australian director Peter Weir was conducting his own exploration of filmic New Journalism with Picnic at Hanging Rock. As with the works of the American writers, the basic elements of the Australian story are apparently historical facts; what the artist brings are fleshed-out characters, plot, dialogue, and the texture of actors and mise-en-scene. As a result, Picnic is far from documentary, but rather a rich, almost literary meditation on a mystery unresolved by conven- tional investigation and the passage of time. Weir’s great daring in this film was to accept the tenets of the New Journalism’s approach and to allow the story to end as it happened, unresolved by a neat fictional package that might satisfy critics and audiences accustomed to artistic closure. In a victory for sophistication, this courageous rejection of convention resulted in Picnic being considered the best film ever made in Australia up to that time and the most successful internationally. Picnic’s factual base concerns the disappearance of three girls (one eventually rediscovered) and a teacher on a school picnic at a popular Australian location for outings in 1900. The students at Appleyard College in the state of Victoria are proper Edwardian young women, being ‘‘finished’’ to take their place in Australian society. Initially, the school and its charges look more like an earlier Victorian ideal of British correctness, rather than a school in the provinces of a colony struggling to escape the English class system. In fact, we soon learn that class conflict is alive and well, with a student who is an orphan treated as a poor relative. It is sexual repression, however, that is most marked and potentially explanatory as a cause of later events. The girls are literally strait-laced: an amusing shot shows a back-to-front lineup, each pulling on the stays of the next in line. Though February 14 is in the midst of the summer season, the girls are dressed more appropriately for a cool British July, and are told they may, as a great treat, remove their white gloves because of the heat. As the party nears Hanging Rock—a weird up-thrust of stone sacred to the Aborigines—concern about its dangers mounts. Venom- ous snakes are mentioned repeatedly, and the science teacher, Miss MacCraw, muses darkly on the Rock’s geological origin, its lava ‘‘forced up from deep down below,’’ perhaps suggesting the sup- pressed emotions in this controlled society. At the picnic grounds the mood changes from girlish excitement to a languid, hot-summer- afternoon sensuality. The girls remove their sun hats and four receive permission to climb, ostensibly to find geological samples. The luminous, other-worldly Miranda, who has had a premonition of ‘‘not being here much longer,’’ hikes upward, accompanied by the dumpy complainer, Edith, and two others. Part way up the rock the girls remove their shoes and stockings after falling asleep as if in unison. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 946 The mood is mystical, pregnant with possibility. Edith complains that the walk is ‘‘nasty,’’ and, growing steadily more fearful, turns back, seeing a ‘‘red cloud’’ and then passing Miss MacCraw on her way up, looking ‘‘funny’’ since the teacher wears no skirt, only ‘‘pantaloons’’ or ‘‘drawers.’’ George Zamphir’s pan flute plays a haunting motif in the background, flocks of birds fly portentously, and the hiking girls are shot in slow motion in lazy, dance-like sequences. Mountains violate our sense of human scale: the girls, and Weir’s camera, look upward and we see nothing as familiar or as manageable as the Victorian furnishings of the school. As Miss MacCraw points out in an amusing correction of the buggy driver, Hanging Rock’s time scale is inhuman as well, not ‘‘thousands of years old,’’ but ‘‘quite young geologically speaking, a million years old.’’ Appleyard College’s hothouse environment has been shattered, and new, magi- cal reality is in operation. Everyone’s watch stops at twelve noon; heavenly choir and piano music accompany sweeping camera shots of flocks of birds rising. Unfamiliar fauna intrudes, including cicadas, with their weird drumming call, and strange lizards. Rumbling, thunder-like noises roll down from Hanging Rock, but there is no storm, only (apparently) the wind playing through peaks and caves. A spoken prologue has told us that ‘‘What we see and what we seem, Are but a dream—a dream within a dream.’’ This reverie is no nightmare but more like what happens during a day-time sleep on a hot day: a disturbing displacement of our conventional perceptions. This is country Weir explored in his excellent The Last Wave: Western rationalism encounters the fluid, intuitive Weltanschauung of aboriginal Australia, an ancient mystical land full of spooky threat and indifference to European scientific certainties. There are also repeated references to Shakespearean characters and trees: the angelic Miranda, yearning upward, contrasted to chubby, ‘‘earthbound Edith’’ four young people disappearing into a forest inhabited by unseen sensual forces; ‘‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day’’ recited by some of the girls at the picnic. While Weir is not insistent about it, the suggestion is that the disappearance of the girls is motivated by repressed sexuality, with their dream-like state an escape into another reality. The balance of the film explores the reactions to and the conse- quences of the disappearances. One of the girls, Irma, is found by Michael, a young visitor entranced by Miranda at the picnic; Irma is sexually ‘‘intact,’’ as the doctor delicately puts it, although her corset is missing and she seems different, perhaps older. Irma is shunned and then abused by her fellow students when she is unable—or perhaps unwilling—to say what happened. Gardners discuss whether the girls could have fallen down a hole or whether a Jack the Ripper has struck. Parents withdraw their children; a lonely student commits suicide, leaping into a greenhouse; the picnic grounds become a media circus; the headmistress descends into alcoholism. The window into another reality has been opened, and nothing can be the same. Weir’s refusal to provide a neat explanation has a variety of artistic consequences. Besides being true to the historical record, the film has the complex resonances of real life, resonances which would be completely absent in the presence of a rational explanation. The thematic point is that it is impossible to speak about the unspeakable—in this society that denies the existence of sex, even the consequences of sex have no name (the maids call illegitimately conceived students ‘‘you know’’). The film, like Weir’s Wave and Witness, thus becomes an anthropological commentary on the blindness and limits of culture when confronting events that fail to fit a frame of reference: Picnic may begin with fact, but ends with our most unsettling speculations. —Andrew and Gina Macdonald THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY USA, 1945 Director: Albert Lewin Production: Loew’s Incorporated for MGM, black and white with Technicolor inserts, 35mm, running time: 111 minutes. Producer: Pandro S. Berman; screenplay: Albert Lewin from the novel by Oscar Wilde; photography: Harry Stradling; editor: Ferris Webster; sound: Douglas Shearer; production designer: Gordon Wiles; art directors: Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters; music: Herbert Stothart; costume designer: Irene; set decorator: Edwin B. Willis; paintings: Henrique Medina (before) and Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (after). Cast: George Sanders (Lord Henry Wotton); Hurd Hatfield (Dorian Gray); Donna Reed (Gladys Hallward); Angela Lansbury (Sibyl The Picture of Dorian Gray THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 947 Vane); Lowell Gilmore (Basil Hallward); Peter Lawford (David Stone); Richard Fraser (James Vane); Miles Mander (Sir Robert Bentley); Lydia Bilbrook (Mrs. Vane); Morton Lowry (Adrian Single- ton); Douglas Walton (Allen Campbell); Mary Forbes (Lady Agatha); Robert Greig (Sir Thomas); Moyna MacGill (Duchess); Billy Bevan (Malvolio Jones); Renie Carson (Young French Woman); Lillian Bond (Kate); Devi Dja and her Balinese Dancers, Sir Cedric Hardwicke (narrator). Awards: Best cinematography in black and white, Harry Stradling, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1945. Publications: Books: Thomas, Tony, The Films of the Forties, Seacaucus, New Jer- sey, 1977. Silver, Alain, ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’’ Magill’s Survey of Cinema, Frank N. Magill, ed., Vol. III, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Parish, James Robert and Gregory W. Mank, The Best of MGM: The Golden Years (1928–59), Westport, Connecticut, 1981. Aachen, George, ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’’ Memorable Films of the Forties, Sydney, Australia, 1987. Mayne, Judith, ‘‘Textual Analysis and Portraits of Spectatorship,’’ Cinema and Spectatorship, London and New York, 1993. Edelman, Rob, and Audrey Kupferberg, Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen, Secaucus, 1997. Felleman, Susan, Botticelli in Hollywood: The Films of Albert Lewin, New York, 1997. Articles: Tyler, Parker, ‘‘Dorian Gray: Last of the Movie Draculas’’ in View (New York), October 1946. Arkadin [John Russell Taylor], ‘‘Film Clips’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1967–68. Arnaud, Claude, ‘‘Les statues meurent aussi,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), January 1982. Combs, Richard, ‘‘Retrospective: The Picture of Dorian Gray’’ and Tom Milne, ‘‘You Are a Professor, Of Course,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1985. Beuselink, James, ‘‘Albert Lewin’s Dorian Gray,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1986. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 1, 1987. Nacache, Jacqueline ‘‘Le Portrait de Dorian Gray,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), 4–10 March 1987. Garsault, Alain, ‘‘Albert Lewin: un créateur à Hollywood,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1989. Bensma?a, Réda, ‘‘La Figure d’inconnu ou l’inconscient épinglé: Le Portrait de Dorian Gray d’Albert Lewin,’’ in Iris (Paris and Iowa City, Autumn 1992. Smith, S.D., ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’’ in Monsterscene (Lom- bard), no. 3, Fall 1994. Felleman, Susan, ‘‘How high was his brow? Albert Lewin, his critics, and the problem of pretension,’’ in Film History (New York), Winter 1995. Piazzo, Philippe, ‘‘Les rêves d’un amateur,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2406, 21 February 1996. Bonesteel, Michael, ‘‘Ivan Albright: Artist of the Living Dead,’’ in Outré (Evanston), no. 9, 1997. Bonesteel, Michael, ‘‘The Man Who Was Dorian Gray,’’ in Outré (Evanston), no. 9, 1997. Turner, George, ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray: Worth a Million Words,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 78, no. 5, May 1997. *** Albert Lewin, who made his directorial debut in 1942 after fifteen years as a writer and producer at MGM, directed three films during the 1940s. All featured George Sanders, fin-de-siècle European settings, and viewed life, art, decadence and sexual thrall through the prism of a pictorial, complex and studied mise-en-scène. The Picture of Dorian Gray was the most expensive and elaborate of the three productions (the other two, The Moon and Sixpence, 1942, and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, 1947, were produced more economically by Loew-Lewin, a relatively short-lived independent production company Lewin founded with David Loew). A film of stunning self- consciousness and density, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a psycho- sexual horror film based on Oscar Wilde’s novel about a beautiful young man who through a Faustian compact remains eternally young while his portrait registers his sins and iniquities. Wilde and Lewin shared a profound disdain for realism, the dominant literary mode of Wilde’s time and the dominant cinematic mode of Lewin’s. And although a film made under the auspices of Hollywood’s largest, most conservative studio in 1945 was subject to more pressure to conform to convention than a novel written by an already (in)famous aesthete in 1890, Lewin’s version of Wilde’s story did avoid dullness—realism’s ‘‘danger of the commonplace,’’ ac- cording to its director. And, although criticized for either its literary pretensions, its Hollywood compromises, or both, it is arguably Lewin’s best film, and certainly his most widely admired. The Picture of Dorian Gray avoided the dangers of the common- place by subjecting itself to dangers of a different order, those resulting from a kind of tightrope act: this self-described equilibrist’s concerted negotiation of intellectual, artistic and commercial viabil- ity. In its realization of a not very visually detailed source, its divergences, often necessitated by Code, from Wilde’s story, and its figuration of content explicitly disallowed or formally problematic, Lewin’s film presents a fascinating mediation between Wilde’s effete aestheticism and Hollywood’s conventional realism. The story’s sexual subtext is embodied in Lewin’s film visually rather than narratively. The most remarkable instance of this occurs during the all-important scene of Dorian Gray’s ‘‘seduction’’ by Lord Henry’s credo of youth and pleasure; it features a butterfly, a classical figurine and a bust that in one crafty dissolve momentarily reconfigure themselves into a kind of inverted image of sexual penetration, thus alluding in a flash to many ‘‘perverse’’ possibilities (see Bensma?a). The psycho-sexual lapse configured by this dissolve is a signal instance of Lewin’s wont of slipping homoerotic and other taboo content past the producers and censors, to whom even the slightest whiff of perversion was anathema. PIROSMANI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 948 The film employs other subtle indices of Dorian Gray’s narcissis- tic and ambiguous sexuality, including copies of Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s sculptures representing the biblical David as erotically provocative youth. These Renaissance reproductions figuratively and, on one occasion, literally reflect Dorian, who, as portrayed by Hurd Hatfield, enacts his every movement, gesture, and expression with circumspect grace. Like a somnambule (as Parker Tyler put it) or a living doll, his Dorian Gray moves with choreographic precision about the film’s exquisite and mannered late-Victorian interiors. Hatfield’s austere, almost minimalist performance achieves a psycho- logical uncanniness worthy of a horror film—an appropriate mood for Lewin’s variation on the theme of the double. Herbert Stothart’s score contributes to the film’s eeriness, employing Chopin’s 24th Prelude as an elegiac leitmotif. In its first shots, of Lord Henry Wotton (Sanders) sitting in his carriage reading Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the film establishes its characteristic mise-en-scène, focusing on frames within the film frame, creating a tension between static, manifestly ‘‘composed’’ compositions and cinematic movement. Windows, doors, mirrors, screens, signs, and paintings are among the frames that permeate the film. This propensity for conspicuous framing is reinforced by Lewin’s bold foregrounding of art works as decorative and symbolic frames, particularly in the many scenes set in Dorian’s house, where neo-classical bas-reliefs and Oriental figurines, often symmetrically arranged, as well as Renaissance paintings and Aubrey Beardsley illustrations are among the images that seem to delimit the characters’ and the camera’s movement. The scene set at ‘‘The Two Turtles,’’ the pub where Dorian first encounters Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury), broadens the field of visual plenitude in which the film revels. The pub, which is as replete with props, placards, tchotchkes and other lower-class items as Dorian’s home is with high art, is the site of unabashed spectacle. Its overloaded artifice is highlighted by the ‘‘Dr. Look’’ sandwich-board that follows Dorian in. The single, disembodied eye of the advertise- ment, with its uncanny background as Surrealist icon and apotropaic talisman, seems to watch over the scene. The strange, almost explic- itly sexual performance of Mr. and Mrs. Ezekiel, a xylophone-puppet act, and any number of cinematic puns and echoes make this scene, along with that set in a den of unspecified iniquities at Blue Gate Field, one of the film’s strongest and most original. The film’s preoccupation with the framing and scrutiny of visual experience and desire is brought into focus around the central image of the picture of Dorian Gray itself. While in Wilde’s novel, it is the idea of such a phenomenon—a portrait that ages in lieu of its sitter— that means to horrify, in the film it is the picture itself that moves. Thus the fastidiously disgusting, hyper-real portrait by Ivan Albright, suspensefully withheld and then shown in Technicolor insert, casts a shadow across the cultivated visual exquisiteness of the black-and- white scenes. The idea that Beauty is Truth, the evident credo of Dorian Gray’s friends and would-be lovers, is revealed as fallacy. In fact, the truth is uglier than can be imagined. In the end, The Picture of Dorian Gray is, if not a subversion, at least a rather disturbing contemplation, paradoxically, of the very forces that ensured its success—the seductiveness of beauty and the rapture of spectacle, and the perils that accompany succumbing to these. —Susan Felleman PIROSMANI USSR, 1971 Director: Georgy Shengelaya Production: Gruzia Films; Sovcolor, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Released 1971. Filming completed 1971. Screenplay: Erlom Akhvlediani and Georgy Shengelaya; photogra- phy: Constantin Opryatine; music: V. Koukhianidzé. Cast: Avtandil Varazi (Niko Pirosmanichvili); David Abachidzé; Zourad Carpianidzé; Teimouraz Beridzé; Boris Tsipouria; Chota Daouchvili; Maria Guaramadzé; Nino Setouridzé; Rosalia Mintshine. Publications Script: Akhvlediana, Erlom, and Georgy Shengelaya, Pirosmani, in Avant- Scene du Cinéma (Paris), 15 December 1979. Book: Liehm, Mira, and Antonin Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Articles: Matei, G., in Cinema (Bucharest), April 1972. Marazov, I., in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), June 1972. Bensch, S., in Film a Doba (Prague), October 1972. Trujillo, M., in Cine Cubano (Havana), nos. 86–88, 1973. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Unfamiliar Talents,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), February 1974. Variety (New York), 12 June 1974. Elley, D., in Films and Filming (London), September 1974. Glaessner, Verina, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), Septem- ber 1974. Capdenac, Michel, in Ecran (Paris), 15 November 1975. Gauthier, G., in Image et Son (Paris), December 1975. Haustrate, G., ‘‘Pirosmani: Une Osmose quasi pariaite,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Portal, M., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Horton, A., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 2, 1979. Aidan, M., ‘‘Notes sur l’auteur de Pirosmani: Gueorgui Chenguelaia,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), October-November 1989. *** Pirosmani is one of the works that has contributed to the reputa- tion of recent Georgian Soviet film. The director, Georgi Shengelaya, PIXOTE A LEI DO MAS FRACOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 949 is a member of a prominent film family. (His father was one of the pioneers of the Georgian industry; his mother was an early star; and his brother is also a director.) The film portrays the life of Georgian primitive artist Niko Pirosmanishvili, who died in 1918. Yet if the film is considered in terms of the familiar category of the art bio-pic, it is obvious that it minimizes the dramatic and psychologizing tenden- cies frequently associated with this genre. The film presents events from the artist’s life in episodic form: through the accretion of individual scenes, the status of the artist is gradually defined. But the film’s point of view toward, and explanation of, its main character is developed almost elliptically. A distinct reticence characterizes the film as a whole and the people within it. In part this is due to the measured pauses in dialogue and silences within specific scenes. In addition, the narrative is not developed in terms of strong casual links but can only be fully understood in terms of retrospective reconstruc- tion; each sequence does not proceed clearly and unambiguously to the next. Instead, mid-way through a particular scene, some event or line of dialogue may indicate that it is now one week, or three years, later than the previous scene. For example, at one point Pirosmani opens a diary store. Some time later his sister and her husband unexpectedly come for a visit; their conversation indicates it has been some time since they have seen one another. His sister suggests that he should get married. The scene is immediately followed by one of a wedding. In mostly long shots one sees guests arriving, receiving flour, dancing, toasting the couple, and generally engaging in those activities associated with wedding receptions. The scene ends when Pirosmani gets up from the table and walks out. Back at his store he explains to his partner that the wedding was a trick, that the bride’s relatives have stolen his flour. However, their treachery is not at all clear during the marriage scene; in context, the distribution of the flour appears as something on the order of a social custom. Moreover, whatever reticence and uneasi- ness Pirosmani exhibits during the wedding scene is not any different from his appearance and behaviour through most of the film. Thus, one can make sense of his departure and understand that something is wrong only after the fact; even then the extent of our comprehension is limited. Pirosmani subsequently causes his business to fall by raising prices exorbitantly on his steady paying customers and by giving his stock away to poor children. One gathers that these actions are a response to his wedding experience, an expression of general disgust and of feeling exploited. But his attitude is not fully clarified by the film. Through such episodes the status of the artist is seen to be that of an outsider. Pirosmani never fits into any defined social group; he rejects his business and marriage. At one point some artists are interested in his work and invite him to the city. But his glory is short- lived. He is uncomfortable and out of place in the world of salon intellectuals, and his work is ridiculed by a mainstream art critic in a newspaper. The film uses painting to structure its narrative of the artist’s life. The major segments of the film are indicated by images of Pirosmani paintings, ‘‘Giraffe,’’ ‘‘White Cow,’’ ‘‘Easter Lamb,’’ and others. The paintings function as titles and transitional devices. For example, the picture of the white cow precedes a shot of the main character walking through the streets among a herd of cows. Later the painting is hung outside his store, ‘‘so people will know what we sell.’’ In fact the filmic mise-en-scène is modeled on the paintings. Frontal medium and long shots predominate, with simple decor and stark lighting, imitating the primitivism of the paintings we see in the film. In this way the art itself becomes the most significant structuring principle of the film and its central subject. —M. B. White PIXOTE A LEI DO MAS FRACO (Pixote) Brazil, 1981 Director: Hector Babenco Production: H. B. Filmes Embrafilme; Eastmancolor, 35mm; run- ning time: 127 minutes. Released 26 September 1980. Filmed in S?o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Producers: Paolo Francini and José Pinto; screenplay: Hector Babenco, Jorge Duran, based on the novel A Infacias dos Mortos by José Louzeiro; photography: Rodolfo Sanchez; editor: Luiz Elias; assistant director: Maria Cecilia M. de Barros, Fatima Toledo; art director: Clovis Bueno; music: John Neschling; sound editor: Hugo Gama; sound recording: Francisco Carneiro. Cast: Fernando Ramos da Silva (Pixote); Jorge Juliao (Lilica); Gilberto Moura (Dito); Edilson Lino (Chico); Zenildo Oliveira Santos (Fumaca); Claudio Bernardo (Garotao); Israel Feres David (Roberto pede Iata); José Nilson Martin Dos Santos (Diego); Marilia Pera (Sueli); Jardel Filho (Sapatos Brancos—The Inspector); Rubens de Falco (Judge); Elke Maravilha (Debora); Tony Tornado (Cristal); Beatriz Segall (The Widow); Joao Jose Pompeu (Almir); Aricle Perez (The Teacher); Isadora de Farias (The Psychologist). Awards: New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film, 1981; Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film, 1981; National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress (Marilia Pera), 1981; Locarno Festival Silver Leopoard Award, 1981; San Sebastian Festival Special Mention Awards, 1981. Publications Articles: Pereira, Edmar, Jornal da Tarde (Sao Paulo), 19 September 1980. Arco e Flexa, Jairo, Veja (Sao Paulo), 1 October 1980. Angelica, Joana, O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), 20 October 1980. Schild, Susana, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 24 October 1980. Canby, Vincent, New York Times, 5 May 1981. Variety (New York), 6 May 1981. Stone, Judy, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 June 1981. PIXOTE A LEI DO MAS FRACO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 950 Pixote a lei do mais fraco Tavares, Zulmira Ribeiro, ‘‘A Briga de Pixote,’’ in Filme e Cultura, number 38/39, August/November 1981. Sullivan, James, Films in Review (New York), 12 September 1981. Sullivan, J., Films in Review (New York), November 1981. Kael, Pauline, New Yorker, 9 November 1981. Bonneville, L., Séquences (Montreal), January 1982. Corliss, Richard, Time, 18 January 1982. Cuel, F., Cinématographe (Paris), April 1982. Paranagua, P. A., ‘‘Sur le fil du rasoir’’ in Positif (Paris), April 1982. Welsh, H., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), April/May 1982. Cros, J. L., Image et Son (Paris), June 1982. Csicsery, G., ‘‘Individual Solutions’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1982. Imeson, J., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1983. LeFanu, M., Films and Filming (London), January 1983. Hawken, J., and C. Htewski, ‘‘Exploitation for Export,’’ in Screen (London), March/April 1983. Stam, R., Cineaste (New York), 1983. Schild, Susana, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 9 February 1986. Schild, Susana, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 27 February 1988. Folha de Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo), 6 December 1989. Azeredo, Ely, O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), 5 February 1993. The New York Times, vol. 147, A34 and B29, 19 December 1997. Purtell, Tim, in Entertainment Weekly, no. 414, 16 January 1998. *** Pixote a lei do mais fraco directed by Hector Babenco, is one of those films whose subject matter has so escaped the darkness of the projection room as to make it impossible to comment on it merely in terms of filmmaking. Pixote’s story continued, a painful and foretold tragedy, for seven years, until its dreadful epilogue. The launch of Pixote (the word means ‘‘urchin’’) in 1980 hit the public like a mule’s kick by addressing the shocking reality— couched in scenes of raw beauty—of one of Brazil’s most serious social problems, that of abandoned children, of which there are several million in the country. The international recognition of Pixote (voted the third best foreign film of the 1980s by the magazine American Film) confirmed that Hector Babenco had conceived an outstanding film about violated youth and the painful loss of inno- cence, ranked with Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados. Hector Babenco, born in Argentina, resident A PLACE IN THE SUNFILMS, 4 th EDITION 951 in Brazil since the late 1960s, found inspiration for Pixote in A Infancia dos Mortos (The Infancy of the Dead) by José Lonzeiro. With Pixote—which followed O Rei da Noite (1976) and Lucio Flávio, O Passageiro da Agonia (1977), a huge box office success— Babenco consolidates what would become his dominant theme: people living on the fringes of society, treading the fine line between petty crime and considerable risk. The theme is resumed in his later films, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ironweed, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. The underprivileged communities living on the outskirts of S?o Paulo provided the cast for the film: dozens of poor and ostracized youngsters, none of whom had ever acted before. Among them was Fernando Ramos da Silva, who lived with eight brothers and his widowed mother in a S?o Paulo shanty town. Slightly built, shy and, as Babenco put it, ‘‘with an old man’s face’’ Fernando was 11 years old when filming began on Pixote. His poignant acting is a mixture of naiveté and fear, his expressions bore the cares of the world. His face became a symbol for what he was and what he represented: the drama of the abandoned child. The film was ‘‘univer- sal in its grief,’’ according to the author of the book on which it was based. Following the trajectory of Pixote—first in a police station, then in a reformatory, and finally on the streets of Rio and S?o Paulo—the film plunges deep into the world of abandoned Brazilian youth. Pixote witnesses and is a product of the three-fold collapse which is the root cause of the tragedy of street children: the breakdowns of the family unit, the social services and the institutions. The children and adolescents have on their side one paradoxical guarantee: that of exemption from the punitive aspects of the law until they reach official adulthood at the age of 18. This impunity also makes them ideal as apprentice criminals, especially under the tutelage of fully blown adult drug runners. The sordid environment of the reformatory is the back drop for the initial part of the film; to the insensitive attitude of those in authority is added the impotence of those who wish to help (teachers and psychologists). Only the very strong can survive the situation, where solidarity and sadism set the tone. Hector Babenco did not recoil at revealing the atrocities of the environment—sexual abuse, police violence, early contact with drugs. However, he still manages, despite the ugliness and degradation, to produce scenes of great poetry. An example is the scene where Pixote tries to follow a football match and darts and pokes his head around the body of the woman who is cutting his hair. Later, in the classroom, he laboriously writes ‘‘the earth is round like an orange,’’ his face is viewed close-up while he mutters the words he is writing. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the reformatory, accentuated by cold, blue lighting, gives way to the colours of the streets of S?o Paulo and Rio. After fleeing the reformatory, Pixote, the youngest boy, forms a little gang with three friends, one of whom is a transves- tite, Lilica (played by the excellent Jorge Juli?o). Having made contact with a cocaine dealer, the little gang departs for Rio to sell the drugs; increasing violence culminates in Pixote committing his first murder. His encounter with the prostitute Sueli (Marilia Pera in an outstanding performance) figures among the most significant scene in any or all Brazilian films: having killed his customer and his friend, Pixote suckles at the breast of the prostitute, who had aborted a few days previously, in a poignant allusion to the Pietá. The conclusion of the scene probes the heavy ambiguity of the prostitute in relation to motherhood. Notwithstanding the Cinema Novo’s awareness of social con- cerns, Hector Babenco opted for a straightforward narrative in Pixote, in which the camera restricts itself to depicting scenes and situations and, above all, their effect on the characters. The pace is sustained by the careers of the boys themselves and the tragedy stamped on the faces of these youthful crooks; tension is provided by the awfulness of some of the scenes and by the hopelessness of the children’s lot. Babenco was remorselessly realistic in his portrayal, while remaining sympathetic in his search for lost innocence. Not wishing to produce a documentary about street children, nor attempting to identify social causes for the problem, Babenco stated that he ‘‘used the reality as a trampoline in trying to find the human being inside every juvenile offender.’’ Early in the film, Babenco shows hundreds of ‘‘Pixotes,’’ slowly homing in on the group whose progress he would follow, and gradually narrowing his sights on Pixote. At the end of the film, Pixote, who carries the weight of three murders on his childish shoulders, walks alone down the railway track, a revolver his sole companion. Fernando Ramos da Silva tried to pursue a career as an actor, following the success of Pixote, but his stardom was short-lived. Once again on the road to nowhere, through total lack of prospects, he ran into trouble with the authorities, and was shot dead by the police in 1987, at the age of 19. He fulfilled the destiny of the Pixote of the film; but, more tragically, that of the many Pixotes in true life, also. Fernando Ramos da Silva became Pixote—on screen and in true life—forever. —Susana Schild A PLACE IN THE SUN USA, 1951 Director: George Stevens Production: Paramount Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 122 minutes. Released 1951. Producer: George Stevens; screenplay: Harry Brown and Michael Wilson, from the novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser; photography: William C. Mellor; editor: William Hornbeck; mu- sic: Franz Waxman; costume designer: Edith Head. Cast: Montgomery Clift (George Eastman); Elizabeth Taylor (Angela Vickers); Shelley Winters (Alice Tripp); Anne Revere (Hannah Eastman); Sheppard Strudwick (Anthony Vickers); Frieda Inescort (Mrs. Vickers); Keefe Brasselle (Earl Eastman); Fred Clark (Bel- lows); Raymond Burr (Frank Marlowe). Awards: Oscars for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography—Black and White, Best Editing, Best Music— Dramatic or Comedy Picture, and Best Costume—Black and White, 1951. A PLACE IN THE SUN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 952 A Place in the Sun Publications Books: Richie, Donald, George Stevens: An American Romantic, New York, 1970, 1985. Phillips, Gene D., The Movie Makers: Artists in the Industry, Chi- cago, 1973. Hirsch, Foster, Elizabeth Taylor, New York, 1973. d’Arcy, Susan, The Films of Elizabeth Taylor, London, 1974. Laguaria, Robert, Monty: A Biography of Montgomery Clift, New York, 1977. Bosworth, Patricia, Montgomery Clift: A Biography, New York, 1978. Agte, Lloyd M., Harry Peter McNab Brown: A Classical Stylist and Hollywood Screenwriter, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980. Petri, Bruce, A Theory of American Film: The Films and Techniques of George Stevens, New York, 1987. Vermilye, Jerry, and Mark Ricci, The Films of Elizabeth Taylor, Secaucus, 1989. Parker, John, Five for Hollywood: Their Friendship, Their Fame, Their Tragedy, Secaucus, 1991. McCann, Graham, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando, and Dean, Piscataway, 1993. Kalfatovic, Mary C., Montgomery Clift: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1994. Morley, Sheridan, Elizabeth Taylor, New York, 1999. Articles: Lewis, Stephen, in Films in Review (New York), October 1951. Pichel, Irving, ‘‘Revivals, Reissues, Remakes, and A Place in the Sun,’’ in Quarterly of Radio, Television, and Film (Berkeley), Summer 1952. Martin, Pete, ‘‘The Man Who Made the Hit Called Shane,’’ in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 8 August 1953. Archer, E., ‘‘George Stevens and The American Dream,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 1, 1957. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘George Stevens,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1958. Stang J., ‘‘Hollywood Romantic,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July 1959. THE PLAYERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 953 ‘‘Monograph of George Stevens’s Films,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), December-January 1965. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘George Stevens: His Work,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April and May 1965. Houston, Penelope, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955–56. Roman, Robert C., ‘‘Montgomery Clift,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1966. Beresford, R., ‘‘George Stevens,’’ in Film (London), Summer 1970. Essoe, Gabe, ‘‘Elizabeth Taylor,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1970. Buckley, Michael, ‘‘Shelley Winters,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1970. Dialogue on Film (Washington, D.C.), no. 1, 1972. Kliman, B., ‘‘An American Tragedy: Novel, Scenario, and Films,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Summer 1977. Kass, Judith M., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Kinder, M., ‘‘The Subversive Potential of the Pseudo-Iterative,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 2, 1989–90. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 32, 1997. *** When producer-director George Stevens made A Place in the Sun, based on the highly successful novel, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, in 1951, he faced the difficult job of turning a popular book into a worthwhile film. Dreiser’s book, a detailed work of 850 pages, had already been made into a film in 1931. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, the film was condemned by Dreiser as it changed the emphasis of the story, making the hero the precipitator of events rather than a victim of his society and environment. The celebrated Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein had also produced a treatment of the book when he came to Hollywood in 1930. This version emphasized the importance of society in the tragic events of the story, and was closer to Dreiser’s book than any other version. However, Eisenstein’s story never reached the screen. Irving Piechl comments in his essay ‘‘Revivals, Reissues, Remakes, and ‘A Place in the Sun,’’’ that Stevens’s film is ‘‘not only excep- tional in being more successful than the first [1931] film, it is also the first remake . . . which is made as though for the first time. It tells essentially the same story as the earlier film but with a totally different emphasis and perspective.’’ A Place in the Sun was a success on its release, earning six Academy Awards. Stevens’s story is not an ‘‘American tragedy’’ as such. The director changed the time period of the story to the 1950s and created a hero, George Eastman (Clyde Griffith in Dreiser’s book), who has a chance at achieving his dream, and misses it through a string of circumstances which combine to bring about his downfall. George (Montgomery Clift) is a bright, handsome, but poor boy with rich connections. He visits his successful uncle and gains employment at his factory stacking swimming costumes, but he quickly shows how determined and ambitious he is by suggesting improvements to his workplace. He meets and falls in love with Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), a rich young socialite who is dating Earl, George’s cousin. Much to her parents’ horror, Angela reciprocates George’s love. With his uncle’s support, George overcomes their opposition. How- ever, while dreaming of Angela George makes love to Alice Tripp, a girl who works with him at the factory. When she falls pregnant and tries to blackmail him into marrying her George’s whole future is put in jeopardy. Angela and Alice are presented in opposition to each other as lightness and darkness. Angela is always dressed in pure, virginal white or conservative sober black; Alice, in contrast, wears overly tight clothes, is weary, whiny, and slovenly. Angela is the epitome of wealth and luxury; Alice represents hard work and poverty. It is hardly surprising that George considers murdering Alice. The fact that he changes his mind at the last moment leaves the viewer ambivalent when Alice finally overturns the boat and dies. Is George responsible? Did Alice die because of George’s momentary hesitation before he tries to rescue her? Is his execution just? In the scene when the boat overturns Stevens uses a long shot and then darkness to blur the issue. We do not see what happens but we know that when Alice upsets the boat she is frightened of George: we feel her fear. We are left to make our own judgement about George’s guilt. Stevens uses montage, close-ups, and very slow scenes to create an almost dream like atmosphere. The plot moves along slowly but with great fluidity. Similarly the use of steady slow drums as George contemplates murder creates a hot, dark, and menacing atmosphere. The viewer knows that something awful is going to occur. The famous kiss between Taylor and Clift, which is shot with a six-inch lens in close-up, conveys the intensity and passion existing between the couple—a sensuality that never exists between Alice and George. It is the last thing that George thinks of as he goes to his death, showing that no matter what has happened his love for Angela is the most important thing in his life. A Place in the Sun is a significant film not only because of excellent performances elicited from Montgomery Clift and Eliza- beth Taylor, but also because of the society it depicts. Although George has the opportunity to succeed—his upbringing, his own sense of morality bring about his downfall. In a sense George is doomed from the beginning—he is a victim. —A. Pillai THE PLAYER USA, 1992 Director: Robert Altman Production: Avenue Entertainment; DeLuxe colour, 35mm; running time: 124 minutes. Filmed in Los Angeles, 1991. Producer: David Brown, Michael Tolkin, Nick Weschler; screen- play: Michael Tolkin, from his own novel; photography: Jean THE PLAYER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 954 The Player Lepine; editor: Geraldine Peroni, Maysie Hoy; assistant directors: Allan Nichols, C. C. Barnes; production design: Stephen Altman; art director: Jerry Fleming; music: Thomas Newman; sound edi- tors: Joseph Holsen, Ed Lachmann; sound recording: Rich Gooch, John Pritchet, John Vigran; costume design: Alexander Julian. Cast: Tim Robbins (Griffin Mill); Greta Scacchi (June Gudmundsdottir); Fred Ward (Walter Stuckel); Whoopi Goldberg (Detective Susan Avery); Peter Gallagher (Larry Levy); Cynthia Stephenson (Bonnie Sherow); Brion James (Joel Levison); Vincent D’Onofrio (David Kahane); Dean Stockwell (Andy Civella); Richard E. Grant (Tom Oakley); Sydney Polack (Dick Mellen); Lyle Lovett (Detective DeLongpre). Appearing as themselves: Harry Belafonte, Karen Black, Gary Busey, Robert Carradine, Cher, James Coburn, John Cusack, Brad Davis, Peter Falk, Louise Fletcher, Teri Garr, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Elliot Gould, Joel Grey, Buck Henry, Angelica Houston, Sally Kellerman, Sally Kirkland, Jack Lemmon, Marlee Matlin, Andie McDowell, Malcolm McDowell, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds, Julia Roberts, Mimi Rogers, Annie Ross, Alan Rudolph, Jill St. John, Susan Sarandon, Rod Steiger, Lily Tomlin, Robert Wagner, Bruce Willis. Awards: Best Director, Cannes Film Festival, 1992. Publications Books: Kolker, Robert P., A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, New York, 1988. McGilligan, Patrick, Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff: A Biogra- phy of the Great American Director, New York, 1989. Keyssar, Helene, Robert Altman’s America, New York, 1991. Altman, Robert, ‘‘Altman on Altman,’’ in Projections 2, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, London 1993. Cagin, Seth, Born to Be Wild: Hollywood & the Sixties Generation, Boca Raton, 1994. O’Brien, Daniel, Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor, New York, 1996. Sterritt, David, editor, Robert Altman: Interviews, Jackson, 2000. THE PLAYERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 955 Articles: McCarthy, T., Variety (New York), 16 March 1992. Sauvaget, D., ‘‘Le retour du grand Bob,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), May 1992. Camy, G., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), May-June 1992. Raymond, R., Films in Review (New York), May-June 1992. Smith, G., and R. T. Jameson, Film Comment (New York), May- June 1992. Henry, M., and J.-P. Coursodon, Positif (Paris), June 1992. Wilmington, M., and P. Keogh, ‘‘Laughing and Killing,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), June 1992. Sheehan, H., Sight and Sound (London), July 1992. Blois, M. de, ‘‘Ce que je vois de ma tour d’ivoire,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), Summer 1992. Quart, L., and others, Cineaste (New York), 1992. Schupp, P., Séquences (Montreal), September 1992. Sawhill, R., Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1992–93. Travers, Peter, ‘‘Ten Best Movies of 1992,’’ in Rolling Stone, no. 648, 21 January 1993. Danzinger, M., ‘‘Basic Instinct: Grappling for Post-Modern Mind Control,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 22, no.1, January 1994. Sugg, R.P., ‘‘The Role of the Writer in The Player: Novel and Film,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 22, no. 1, Janu- ary 1994. La Rochelle, ‘‘Réal: Non pas la réalité, mais celle du cinéma,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 71, February-March 1994. Adams, D., ‘‘Thomas Newman’s The Player,’’ in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), no. 72, August 1996. Everett, Anna, ‘‘The Other Pleasure: The Narrative Function of Race in the Cinema,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 20, no. 1–2, Fall-Winter 1995–1996. Elia, M., ‘‘The Player,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 189/190, March/June 1997. Rush, J., and C. Baughman, ‘‘Language as Narrative Voice: The Poetics of the Highly Inflected Screenplay,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Los Angeles), vol. 4, no. 3, 1997. Nayman, Ira, ‘‘The Adaptable Altman,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 3, Fall 1997. *** Movies about the movies are a staple Hollywood sub-genre that’s been with us since the dawn of the movies themselves. And it’s practically a formula tradition of these Hollywood behind-the-scenes pictures to cast the industry they portray in the most unsavory light possible. Even such otherwise upbeat and exuberant glimpses into the early days of Tinseltown as the silents Show People and Ella Cinders delivered the cautionary message that stardom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—a message that took even darker turns when the talkies arrived in such films as What Price Hollywood? and the numerous versions of A Star is Born. It’s a stretch to imagine any other industry but Hollywood turning out a product designed by the manufacturers to trash the very industry that feeds them. But that’s the salient quality of most movies about the movies. Their consistent and self-reviling thematic thread is that Holly- wood is a boulevard of broken dreams, a cutthroat business that builds careers only to destroy them, a place that eats its young and casts out its old—a wartorn landscape fueled by an ongoing blood feud between the money men and the creative artist-individual where the latter almost always comes out the loser. This portrait has been reinforced in films from Sunset Boulevard to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Ironically, rather then running the whistleblowers out of town, the industry as often as not has embraced them by showering their scathing exposes with Oscars! Robert Altman’s skewering of the New Hollywood, The Player— itself a multiple Oscar nominee—is but the latest in the long line of Hollywood on Hollywood films to follow this path. Altman even begins the film with a salute to the man who was arguably the most mistreated creative artist in Hollywood history—Orson Welles: a sa- tiric and technically dazzling eight-minute take inspired by the opening scene of Welles’s final Hollywood film, Touch of Evil, a movie and scene to which the numerous central characters we are introduced to in the shot make reverential reference. Altman frameworks his acid satire on the business of Hollywood as a whodunit. Tim Robbins stars as a studio executive who receives a series of threats from an anonymous screenwriter whose career he has put in turnaround. The vengeful screenwriter vows to settle the score and the exec’s hash on behalf of every scribe Robbins has shown callous disregard. Robbins takes the threats seriously and grows progressively paranoid. As writer after writer grovels before him in his power suit pitching story ideas to make a buck, Robbins speculates if this is the one who’s got him marked for death—even as he reflexively puts them and their ideas down. He finally settles on Vincent D’Onofrio, a writer whose lifeblood screenplay Robbins had treated with particu- lar indifference, and sets up a meeting to buy the guy off. After talking at cross purposes for awhile, the two tangle physically and Robbins accidentally kills the man. To his surprise, however, the threats continue. D’Onofrio was a writer who hated him, but not the writer; Robbins is guilty of murdering an innocent man. Faced with staving off a challenge from an ambitious young producer (Peter Gallagher) with an eye on Robbins’s job, sidestepping the police investigation into D’Onofrio’s death by starstruck detective Whoopi Goldberg, swimming with his fellow Hollywood sharks at the studio, juggling love affairs, and covering his tracks while watching his back as the threatening screenwriter closes in, Robbins finds his problems have only just begun. It seemed inevitable that the maverick Altman, a director noted for his acerbic takes on America’s socio-political scene in such films as Nashville and for his well known hatred of Tinseltown’s power structure, would eventually make a Hollywood on Hollywood movie like The Player. That he chose to adapt Michael Tolkin’s blackly comic assault on the wheeler-dealer ‘‘suits’’ who run the business as his comeback film, after years of being written off by those ‘‘suits,’’ was a brash act indeed. That Altman got just about every contempo- rary superstar in Hollywood to accept cameos for a fraction of their usual fees just to be in the movie is a measure not only of their respect for Altman’s maverick status, but their own ambivalent feelings toward the system that supports them. PLAYTIME FILMS, 4 th EDITION 956 But that the movie itself was the most in-demand picture of the year for private screenings by the very studio executives it paints so darkly is probably most amazing of all. But that, it would seem, is show biz’. —John McCarty PLAYTIME France, 1967 Director: Jacques Tati Production: Specta Films, Eastmancolor, 70mm, stereophonic sound; running time: originally 155 minutes,versions for United States release run about 108 minutes or 93 minutes. Released 1967, France. Re-released 1972 in the United States in 35mm version. Filmed on specially constructed sets just outside Paris. Producer: René Silvera; screenplay: Jacques Tati and Jacques Lagrange; photography: Jean Badal and Andreas Winding; editor: Gérald Pollicand; production designer: Eugene Roman; music: Francis Lemarque; African themes: James Campbell; artistic col- laboration: Jacques Lagrange; English dialogue: Art Buchwald. Cast: Jacques Tati (M. Hulot); Barbara Dennek (Young tourist); Jacqueline Lecomte (Her friend); Valérie Camille (M. Luce’s secre- tary); France Romilly (Woman selling eyeglasses); France Delahalle (Shopper in department store); Laure Paillette and Colette Proust (Two women at the lamp); Erika Dentzler (Mme. Giffard); Yvette Ducreux (Hat check girl); Rita Maiden (Mr. Schultz’s companion); Nicole Ray (Singer); Jack Gauthier (The guide); Henri Picolli (An important gentleman); Léon Doyen (Doorman); Billy Kearns (M. Schultz). Publications Books: Armes, Roy, French Cinema since 1946, New York, 1970. Gilliatt, Penelope, Jacques Tati, London, 1976. Maddock, Brent, The Films of Jacques Tati, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1977. Fischer, Lucy, ‘‘Homo Ludens’’: An Analysis of Four Films by Jacques Tati, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Fischer, Lucy, Jacques Tati: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1983. Harding, James, Jacques Tati: Frame by Frame, London, 1984. Chion, Michael, Jacques Tati, Paris, 1987. Dondey, Marc, Tati, with Sophie Tatischeff, Paris, 1989. Haberer, Peter, Aspekte der Komik in den Filmen von Jacques Tati, Coppi, 1996. Bellos, David, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art, London, 2000. Articles: Armes, Roy, ‘‘The Comic Art of Jacques Tati,’’ in Screen (London), February 1970. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Paris Journal,’’ in Film Comment (Paris), Winter 1971–72. Dale, R. C., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1972–73. Gilliatt, Penelope, ‘‘Profiles: Playing,’’ in New Yorker, 27 Janu- ary 1973. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Tati’s Democracy,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1973. Leach, D., in Films in Review (New York), September 1973. Monaco, James, in Take One (Montreal), September 1973. Siegel, J. E., in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1974. Fischer, Lucy, ‘‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity: An Analysis of Jacques Tati’s Playtime,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 4, 1976. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Afterword,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 4, 1976. Thompson, K., ‘‘Playtime: Comedy on the Edge of Perception,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), no. 2, 1979. Selig, Michael, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 17 April, 1979. Bezombes, R., ‘‘De Hulot à Mick Jagger: Playtime,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), July 1979. Boland, B., ‘‘Jacques Tati: L’Autre Monde de Hulot,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1979. Daney, S., ‘‘Eloge de Tati,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Septem- ber 1979. Daney, S., et al., ‘‘Entretiens avec Jacques Tati: Propos rompus,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1979. Schefer, J. L., ‘‘Jacques Tati: La Vitrine,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1979. Johnston, Sheila, in Films and Filming (London), August 1982. Willmott, G., ‘‘Implications for a Sartrean Radical Medium: From Theatre to Cinema,’’ in Discourse (Bloomington, Indiana), Spring- Summer 1990. Rimbau, E., and others, in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 10, Octo- ber 1992. Génin, Bernard, in Télérama (Paris), no. 2244, 13 January 1993. Chevassu, Fran?ois, ‘‘Play Time: les règles du jeu,’’ in Mensuel du Cinéma, no. 3, February 1993. ‘‘Playtime Section’’ of Positif (Paris), May 1993. Rémond, Alain, ‘‘Tati, les toons et nous,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2294, 29 December 1993. *** POKAIANIEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 957 Jacques Tati’s Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society. After building a solid international audience through the 1950s with his comedies Jour de fête, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Mon oncle, Tati spent ten years on the planning and execution of what was to be his masterpiece, selling the rights to all his old films to raise the money he needed to construct the immense glass and steel set—nicknamed ‘‘Tativille’’—that was his vision of modern Paris. The film—two hours and 35 minutes long, in 70mm and stereophonic sound—opened in France in 1967, and was an instant failure. It was quickly reduced, under Tati’s supervision, to a 108-minute version, and further reduced, to 93 minutes and 35 monaural, when it was released in the United States in 1972. Even in its truncated form, it remains a film of tremendous scope, density, and inventiveness. Playtime is what its title suggests—an idyll for the audience, in which Tati asks us to relax and enjoy ourselves in the open space his film creates, a space cleared of the plot-line tyranny of ‘‘what happens next?,’’ of enforced audience identification with star performers, and of the rhetorical tricks of mise-en-scène and montage meant to keep the audience in the grip of pre-ordained emotions. Tati leaves us free to invent our own movie from the multitude of material he offers. One of the ways in which Tati creates the free space of Playtime is by completely disregarding conventional notions of comic timing and cutting. There is no emphasis in the montage to tell us when to laugh, no separation in the mise-en-scène of the gag from the world around it. Instead of using his camera to break down a comic situation—to analyze it into individual shots and isolated movement—he uses deep-focus images to preserve the physical wholeness of the event and long takes to preserve its temporal integrity. Other gags and bits of business are placed in the foreground and background; small patterns, of gestures echoed and shapes reduplicated, ripple across the surface of the image. We can’t look at Playtime as we look at an ordinary film, which is to say, passively, through the eyes of the director. We have to roam the image—search it, work it, play with it. With its universe of Mies van der Rohe boxes, Playtime is often described as a satire on the horrors of modern architecture. But the glass and steel of Playtime is also a metaphor for all rigid structures, from the sterile environments that divide city dwellers to the inflex- ible patterns of thought that divide and compartmentalize experience, separating comedy from drama, work from play. The architecture of Playtime is also an image for the rhetorical structures of classical filmmaking: the hard, straight lines are the lines of plot, and the plate glass windows are the shots that divide the world into digested, inert fragments. At one point in Playtime, M. Hulot stands on a balcony looking down on a network of office cubicles, seeing and hearing a beehive of human activity. As an escalator slowly carries him to the ground floor, the camera maintains his point of view, and the change in perspective gradually eclipses the human figures and turns the sound to silence. It is one of the most profound images of death ever seen in a film, yet it is a death caused by nothing more than a change in camera placement. Tati’s implication is that life can be restored to the empty urban desert simply by putting the camera in the right position, by finding the philosophical overview that integrates all of life’s contradictory emotions, events, and movements into a seamless whole. His film is proof that such a point of view is possible. —Dave Kehr POKAIANIE (Monanieba; Repentance) USSR, 1986 Director: Tengiz Abuladze Production: Gruziafilm; Georgian language; color, 35 mm; running time: 151 minutes. Released November 1986. Filmed in 1984 on location in Georgia, USSR. Producer: Gruziafilm Studio; screenplay: Nana Djanelidze, Tengiz Abuladze, Rezo Kveselava; photography: Mikhail Agranovich; art director: Georgii Mikeladze; music coordinator: Nana Djanelidze. Cast: Avtandil Makharadze (Varlam Aravidze and Abel Aravidze); Zeinab Botsvadze (Keti Barateli); Ia Ninidze (Guliko Aravidze); Merab Ninidze (Tornike Aravidze); Ketevan Abuladze (Nino Barateli); Edisher Giorgiobani (Sandro Barateli); Kakhi Kavsadze (Mikhail Korisheli); Nino Zakariadze (Elena Korisheli); Nato Otzhivaga (Keti as a child); Dato Kemkhadze (Abel as a child); Veriko Andzhaparidze (old woman). Awards: Cannes Special Jury Prize, 1987; Lenin Prize, 1988. Publications Books: Bozhovich, Viktor, editor, Pokaianie [Repentance], Moscow, 1988. Woll, Josephine, and Denise J. Youngblood, Repentance: A Compan- ion Guide, London, 2000. Articles: Batchan, Alexander, ‘‘Mad Russian,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1987. Maslin, Janet, ‘‘Repentance: A Satire from Soviet [sic],’’ in The New York Times, 4 December 1987. POKAIANIE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 958 Pokaianie Woll, Josephine, ‘‘Soviet Cinema: A Day of Repentance,’’ in Dis- sent, Spring 1988. Hinson, Hal, ‘‘Repentance,’’ in The Washington Post, 14 July 1988. Rosenberg, Karen, ‘‘The Movies in the Soviet Union,’’ in The Nation, 21 November 1988. Christensen, Peter G., ‘‘Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance: Despair in the Age of Perestroika,’’ in Soviet and East European Drama, Theatre, and Film, December 1988. Youngblood, Denise J., ‘‘Repentance,’’ in American Historical Review, October 1990. Christensen, Julie, ‘‘Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance and the Georgian Nationalist Cause,’’ in Slavic Review, Spring 1991. Youngblood, Denise J. ‘‘Repentance: Stalinist Terror and the Real- ism of Surrealism,’’ in Robert Rosenstone, editor, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995. *** For most Soviet intellectuals, the heady early years of the Gorbachev era are symbolized by a novel, Children of the Arbat (Deti arbata, by Anatolii Rybakov) and a film, Repentance, better known in the USSR by its Russian title, Pokaianie, than by its native language title, Monanieba. Made by one of Georgia’s best known directors, Tengiz Abuladze (1924–1994), Repentance was the third film in the Geor- gian historical trilogy Abuladze began in 1968 with The Prayer (Vedreba [Georgian]/Molba [Russian]). The Prayer was followed in 1977 by The Tree of Desire (Natvris xe/Drevo zhelanie). Because of Repentance’s politically sensitive subject—the rise of Varlam Aravidze, whose surname means ‘‘every man’’ or ‘‘no man’’ in Georgian, to a position of power and terror in the 1930s—the film was bound to stir controversy. Abuladze sought to circumvent Soviet censorship by making the film for Georgian television, which had three-hour time slots for national productions that Gostelradio, the state television and radio commission, usually did not scrutinize too closely. Despite the protection afforded by Abuladze’s powerful patron Eduard Shevardnadze, then Georgia’s Communist Party secre- tary and now president of the independent Georgian republic, it took two years to complete the picture (1982–84). And it could not be released until after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and launched glasnost. In May 1986, the Soviet Union of Cinematographers purged POKAIANIEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 959 itself of its most conservative members and elected a reformer, the respected director Elem Klimov, as first secretary. Two days after his election, Klimov announced a commission to review and release previously ‘‘shelved’’ films. In November 1986, Repentance re- ceived its first quasi-public screening at the Dom Kino (House of Cinema), the union’s headquarters. By the beginning of 1987, the film was in general distribution in the USSR and quickly exported to the West to the film festival circuit. Repentance is an ambitious film that makes no concessions to the audience, whether Soviet or Western. Long and difficult, the film’s complex, plot-within-a-plot-within-a-plot structure and abstract style, which combines flamboyant surrealism with often tendentious sym- bolism, requires a level of audience dedication that few contemporary directors are audacious enough to demand. Indeed, all reports from Soviet screenings indicate that while the theaters were invariably packed when the film began, they never were when the film ended. Repentance is a landmark historical film, a challenging ‘‘revisioning’’ of the Stalin Terror and a psychological exploration of the mentality of the authoritarian state. The narrative heart of the movie lies in its protracted flashback, but it takes Abuladze some time to get there. The story does not so much unfold as deconstruct, like breaking down a matreshka, the Russian wooden nested doll. Western critics, unaccustomed to the narrative style of Georgian folklore, generally found the film’s plot extremely difficult to follow. Repentance begins in an apartment kitchen, with a woman putting the finishing touches on an elaborately decorated wedding cake. Her male companion is reading a newspaper obituary about the death of the ‘‘great man’’ Varlam Aravidze. Although the viewer does not realize it until later, this brief scene marks the end of the first part of the first framing story. The second framing story opens at Varlam’s funeral. The event is obviously as much a political ritual as a personal acknowledgment of the deceased. Expressions of grief are highly stylized, even from the dead man’s immediate survivors, his son Abel, Abel’s wife Guliko, and the couple’s teenaged son Tornike. That night, a horrified Guliko discovers that Varlam’s corpse has been unearthed from its grave; he stands propped against a tree in their garden. Varlam’s corpse is reburied and unburied two more times, prompting increasingly fren- zied (and comical) activity from both the police and the Aravidze family. Finally, after a night on vigil at the cemetery, the grave robber is captured. To everyone’s surprise, it is Keti Barateli, the middle- aged baker from the opening scene. At her trial, Keti refuses to cooperate with the proceedings. Instead, she defiantly announces that as long as she lives, ‘‘Varlam will not rest. The sentence is final.’’ She then launches into her story: ‘‘Who was Varlam Aravidze? I was eight years old when he became mayor of this city. . . ’’ As we quickly learn in Keti’s flashback, she was the daughter of Sandro Barateli, a well-known artist of ancient and aristocratic lineage. Her mother was the beautiful, madonna-like Nino, named after the patron saint of Georgian Christianity. The traditionalist Sandro quickly comes into conflict with the town’s ‘‘progressive’’ new mayor Varlam Aravidze over the fate of its historic church. By arguing for the preservation of the church as a monument to culture, Sandro has immediately signified himself as one who will side with faith and emotion over reason and progress. Sandro’s and Varlam’s conflict over values builds, culminating in the mayor’s unannounced nocturnal visit to the Barateli apartment, accompanied by his young son Abel and his two henchmen Doksopoulo and Riktofelov. Varlam and Sandro discuss Sandro’s art; Varlam sings Italian arias and recites Shakespeare; Varlam admires the lovely Nino. Meanwhile, the child- ren Abel and Keti discuss heaven, and Keti assures Abel that is where his dead mother is. Shortly after the unwelcome guests leave the Baratelis’, Varlam returns, to give Nino the crucifix that young Abel has taken. While Nino prophetically dreams of her family’s doom, Sandro pensively plays the piano. The doorbell rings. Doksopoulo and Riktofelov have returned, clad in medieval armor, to arrest him. The roundup has begun. Next to be arrested is Mikhail Korisheli, Sandro’s longtime friend. Although he is the local Party secretary, Mikhail is nonetheless powerless to defend Sandro from tyranny, nor indeed can Mikhail ultimately save himself. In several heartbreaking scenes, we see the swift deterioration of Nino’s and Keti’s lives as relatives of an ‘‘enemy of the people,’’ culminating in Nino’s pitiful attempt to offer herself to Varlam in exchange for her husband. In the meantime, Mikhail Korisheli, now deranged from torture, tries to persuade Sandro to confess: ‘‘We must sign everything and reduce it all to complete absurdity.... We’ll sign a thousand stupid state- ments.’’ Sandro is executed (crucified) at the same moment that the medieval church is blown-up to make way for ‘‘progress.’’ Nino’s arrest quickly follows. We return now to the second part of the second flashback, as the adult Keti says to the shocked court, ‘‘And that was the end of Nino Barateli.’’ Those present erupt; ‘‘She’s insane!’’ they shout. The only person who believes Keti’s tale is Varlam’s grandson Tornike, who receives only evasive answers when he questions his father Abel: ‘‘Those were complicated times. . . It’s difficult to explain now. . . The situation was different then.’’ Despite Abel’s fervent desire not to remember (which is different from ‘‘forgetting’’), he is clearly troubled. So it is left to his hardbitten wife Guliko to manage the family affairs. She decides it would be best to have Keti declared insane and committed to an asylum. As Guliko schemes, it is her own husband’s sanity that is in doubt. Hamlet-like, Abel converses with his father’s ghost. The next day, as the trial continues, Guliko triumphs. But her victory over truth and memory is short-lived. As Guliko and the Aravidze clique celebrate, young Tornike takes the burden of his family’s guilt and atonement on himself. He commits suicide with a rifle that was a gift from his beloved grandfather. Afterward, the grief-stricken Abel himself digs up Varlam’s corpse and throws it off a cliff to the ravens. A satisfying ending: Abel at last understands that the past cannot be buried. Except that this is not the end. In his most maddening challenge to the spectators, who have after all patiently watched to this point, Abuladze now returns to the opening scene of Keti in her kitchen, with the man reading the newspaper. Was all this no more than her revenge fantasy? An elderly woman taps at the window to ask Keti if this street leads to a church. Keti responds sadly, ‘‘This is Varlam Street. It will not take you to a church.’’ The old woman retorts, ‘‘Then what’s the use of it? What good is a road if it does not lead to a church?’’ Shaking her head in dismay, she walks haltingly away. Obviously it is impossible to do more than scratch the surface of such a rich and complicated film in a brief synopsis, even in terms of POPIOL I DIAMENT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 960 explicating its content, not to mention its form. Repentance is a political allegory about the rise of authoritarian culture and its persistence over generations that spoke directly to the Soviet people in the final years of the experiment that was the USSR. Despite its surrealism (the lunatic dialogue, the medieval knights and inquisitorial courts, the reveries and fantasy)—indeed because of it—Repentance also succeeds as a serious work of history on film. How better to represent an evil that is so abstract that to make it ‘‘realistic’’ is to trivialize it? Like its predecessors in Abuladze’s trilogy, Repentance also seeks to celebrate, for better and ill, the storied culture of Georgia’s ancient civilization—and rescue it from 150 years of Russian and Soviet subjugation. Repentance, which turned out to be Abuladze’s final film (like many other Soviet filmmakers, he turned to politics), is his undisputed masterpiece. The movie was quickly acknowledged as a major artistic achievement in the European and American press at the time of its release, for its political audacity, stunning cinematography, and a tour-de-force performance by the well-known Georgian theater actor Avtandil Makharadze in the dual roles of Varlam and Abel Aravidze. Indulgent nods were given to its overwrought symbolism, especially the Christian motifs which Soviet spectators also found incomprehensible, as well as to challenges presented by its unfamiliar structure. In the USSR, the reactions were more complicated, and of course, more personal, since Repentance was about their lives, not some- body’s else’s troubled past. Its merits as a work of art aside, Repentance launched a painful national debate about history and memory, collective guilt and individual responsibility. Few films can claim to have had such sweeping social influence. —Denise J. Youngblood POPIOL I DIAMENT (Ashes and Diamonds) Poland, 1958 Director: Andrzej Wajda Production: Film Polski; black and white, 35mm; running time: 105 minutes; length: 2938 meters. Released October 1958. Filmed 1958. Cost 5,000,000 zlotys. Producer: Stanislaw Adler; screenplay: Jerzy Andrzejewski and Andrzej Wajda, from the novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski; photogra- phy: Jerzy Wójcik; editor: Halina Nawrocka; sound engineer: Bogdan Bienkowski; production designer: Roman Mann; music: Rhythm Quintet of the Polish Radio of Warsaw; costume designer: Katarzyna Chodorowicz. Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski (Maciek Chelmicki); Ewa Kryzjewska (Krystyna); Waclaw Zastrzezynski (Szczuka); Adam Pawlikowski (Andrzej); Jan Ciecierski (The porter); Bogumil Kobiela (Drewnowski); Stanislaw Milski (Pieniazjek); Arthur Mlodnicki (Kotowicz); Halina Kwiatkowska (Mme. Staniewicz); Ignacy Machowski (Waga); Zbigniew Skowroński (Slomka); Barbara Krafft (Stefka); Aleksander Sewruk (Swiecki). Award: Award from the International Cinema Press, Venice Film Festival, 1959. Publications Script: Andrzejewski, Jerzy, and Andrzej Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds, in Three Films by Andrzej Wajda, London, 1973. Books: McArthur, Colin, editor, Andrzej Wajda: Polish cinema, London, 1970. Michatek, Boleslaw, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda, London, 1973. Liehm, Mira, and Antonín Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Ellis, Jack C., A History of Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1979. Eder, Klaus, and others, Andrzej Wajda, Munich 1980; Nantes, 1982. Historia Filmu Polskiega, vol. 4, Warsaw, 1981. Douin, Jean-Luc, Wajda, Paris, 1981. Paul, David W., Politics, Art, and Commitment in the Eastern European Cinema, New York, 1983. Wajda, Andrzej, Un Cinema nommé désir, Paris, 1986. Articles: Michatek, Boleslaw, ‘‘Polish Notes,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1958–59. Jakubowski, Jan Zygmunt, ‘‘Ashes Falsified,’’ and Zbigniew Zaluski, ‘‘Ashes Simplified,’’ in Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 42, 1965. Higham, C., ‘‘Grasping the Nettle: The Films of Andrzej Wajda,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Autumn 1965. Minchinton, John, ‘‘Zbigniew Cybulski,’’ in Film (London), Spring 1967. Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), no. 69–72, 1968. Hendrykowski, M., ‘‘Realizm i symbolizm Popiolu i diamentu Andrzeja Wajda,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), January 1972. Sirbu, E., in Cinema (Bucharest), May 1975. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), March 1977. Dipont, M., ‘‘Andrzej Wajda,’’ in Polish Film Polonaise (Warsaw), no. 4, 1979. POPIOL I DIAMENTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 961 Popiol i diament Brill, E., and L. Rubenstein, ‘‘The Best Are Dead or Numb: A Second Look at Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds,’’ in Cineaste (New York), no. 3, 1981. Czesejko-Sochacka, E., in Kino (Warsaw), September 1981. Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1986. Koltai, A., ‘‘A versailles-i fattyu,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 2, 1990. Kino (Warsaw), May 1990. Lubelski, T., in Kino (Warsaw), September 1992. Paul, D., ‘‘Andrzej Wadja’s War Trilogy,’’ Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. Przylipiak, Miros?aw, ‘‘Jubileusz Andrzeja Wadjy,’’ Kino (Warsaw), vol. 30, March 1996. Marszatek, Rafa?, ‘‘Popio?; diament: watek odnaleziony,’’ Kino (Warsaw), vol. 32, no. 379, December 1998. Macnab, Geoffrey, Sight and Sound (London), vol. 8, no. 2, Febru- ary 1998. *** The best work of Wajda begins in 1958, and his epic Popiol i diament represents the climax of the entire Polish school. The literary source for this film is the novel of the same name by Jerzy Andrzejewski published in 1948. The book, which openly speaks of the complicated Polish society at the end of the war and in the first days of peace, was initially criticized, but was eventually accepted as the best work of prose published in the postwar years. Filmmakers soon became interested, but several attempts at adapting it in the early 1950s fell through. In 1957, when a promising scenario appeared, its author was the young director Andrzej Wajda, and the novel was somewhat changed. The novel differs from the film in that it takes place in one day and one night. The setting of the story, with the exception of a few short scenes, is the hotel in town. The principal character in the novel is young Maciek Chelmicki, a member of the guerilla group ‘‘Armii krajowej,’’ which fought against the Germans during the war, jointly with communists. The deep political differ- ences between the two groups led to the communists engaging in acts of terrorism, aimed toward the forming of a new society for the people of Poland. Maciek is a bold young man, prepared to give up his life for POPIOL I DIAMENT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 962 higher ideals, After the end of the war, he is given orders to kill a man, and so is faced with the tragic choice between a growing awareness of the absurdity of the command and his loyalty to duty. The decision to kill or not creates a conflict of conscience. To kill is to violate the law of peace; if he does not go through with it, he creates discord in a situation of war. Maciek’s counterpart is the communist, Szczuka, an ex-soldier of the Spanish revolution. Only a short time before they fought on the same side against their mutual foe. At the time when the film begins, they are confronting one another, foes in life and death, cruelly tied together by the past. Their conflict is obviously not a personal matter, but a conflict of two different conceptions of the future. It reflects a disorganized society at the boundary between war and peace. Wajda presents it with dramatic conciseness at a banquet held on the occasion of the signing of the German capitulation. At one table are gathered the former allies, and also the bourgeois politicians and an assortment of careerists and opportunists who are prepared for defeat while (at the same time) seeking the largest share of the spoils. Against the background of this gathering the fate of both heroes is being decided. These two have a divided ideological orientation, differing experiences in life and in politics, and belong to different generations. Nevertheless, they have much more in common than is seen at first glance. First of all they share an allegiance to the ideal for which they fight and work, allegiance to those with whom they together fought, and a determination to strive for the best in the positions they have been entrusted with. Their relationship becomes an image of self-contradiction or paradox; for instance, Maciek has the order to kill; that he has mistakenly killed someone else instead of Szczuka means he has done his job badly. Szczuka and his friend realize that they are incapable of the art of governing, that they do not have the necessary experience; that depresses them, exhausts them, but they know they must work for their ideal until the end of their lives. The most obvious similarities between the two are seen in consecutive sequences, Maciek, at the bar, is lighting glasses filled with alcohol as a memorial to his fallen comrades and is remembering with enthusiasm the years of fighting, which were so difficlt and at the same time so simple, where everything was clearly understood because all activities were directed to one purpose—to annihilate the foe in war. So too, Szczuka reminisces with his friend about times past, and comrades that fell in Spain. Their reminiscing is marked with sadness and nostalgia, and they also realize how, after the victorious war, everything about their nationalistic ideals was uncomplicated. Maciek and Szczuka are kept distinct from the other guests that are gathered in the hotel, and from the closing sequence, when both rebels are dying and the drunken group at the banquet is mostly asleep, emerges the main idea of the work. By validating the character and deeds of both protagonists. Wajda avoided the infertile narrative conventions which place the hero in one system. The result of understanding the complications of the story is comprehension of how difficult it was for an honest person to find his way in that mixed up situation. Maciek and Szczuka are honest people, and beyond everything that pitted them against each other, they belonged to the best that existed in the land. That is why their death, unthinkable and absurd, is a tragedy of Poland. A new look at reality characterized Wajda’s unprecedented style which sprang out of two previous films, but here reaches the epitome of art. Immersing the film in actuality and concreteness, in contrast with Kanal, he returns to classic dramatic construction, the unity of place and time, and gradually uncovers the heroes’ character and motives. The picture is saturated with symbols and metaphors, which are capable of expressing the tension between objective actuality and the subjective aspect of expression. The use of narration and pictur- esque symbolic metaphors sharpens Wajda’s drama and broadens the gamut of associations evoked by the conflict depicted. This may be illustrated by two important sequences. The first takes place in a cemetery and in a half-demolished church. Maciek falls in love with the girl Krystyna, he spends a night with her, and before he departs, they walk to a church. Krystyna reads an inscription on a grave stone, verse of the Polish poet Cyprian Norwida, which explains Maciek’s situation and also provides the title of the film. ‘‘Here nothing but ashes will remain, the storm in an instant to oblivion will sweep them, from the ashes perhaps a diamond will emerge, shining victoriously for centuries, it will have blossomed for you.’’ Dominating the church’s interior is a picture of a statue of Jesus Christ, hung head down as a symbol of the overthrown values. It is a scene of extraordinary visual impact, but at the same time is very meaningful, because here end Maciek’s doubts, his loyalty to a lost cause and his yearning for a normal life, his thoughts conform to reality. With the same intensity, symbols also inform the ending of the film, depicting the death of both protagonists. Dying Szczuka, felled by Maciek’s shots, falls into Maciek’s arms, and his death is accompanied by the clanging fire engines celebrating victory. Maciek is killed by a drunk from the banquet. In agony Maciek stumbles to the huge rubbish heap, like the rubbish heap of history. In the accomplished cast, it is impossible not to mention the significance of the main character. Wajda chose the unknown actor Zbigniew Cybulski who made his debut in the film Pokolenie in a cameo role. This choice proved to be a happy one. Cybulski, with his capability of making an effortless transition from a state of maximum concentration to being relaxed, managed to embody in his character the zeal of exultation, emotion, strength, and gentleness. Maciek in his characterization is a boy who becomes involved with insignificant people and causes, but he is also a warrior, who is constantly in the line of fire, one who loves weapons because they give him a feeling of freedom. In that he is a man of the generation of 1945. But Cybulski, in realizing the director’s intentions, communicates more. His hesita- tion in searching for meaning shields him from reality. The soft, thoughtful charm, underlined by black glasses and a costume which does not represent that time, makes him representative of the young people of the 1950s. With that he became a hero of two generations. This ‘‘double character,’’ as Cybulski grasps it, added markedly to the clamorous acceptance of the film by young people. Even Andrzejewski was satisfied. ‘‘The measure of my satisfaction is that during the writing of the book, I pictured Maciek Chelmicki entirely differently. Now when I see the film, I see him only this way, as Cybulski played him.’’ In the postwar history of Polish film the premiere of Popiol i diament was the most extraordinary event in terms of opening up consideration of problems which up to that time were schematically or falsely pictured, leading to open criticism by the newer generation. Added to Wajda’s success was the fact that he spoke with a new artistic tongue, without arrogance and declamation, and that he found POTOMOK CHINGIS-KHANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 963 a voice in harmony with the warmer political climate of the second half of the 1950s. —B. Urgo?íkova PORTRAIT OF TERESA See RETRATO DE TERESA POTOMOK CHINGIS-KHAN (The Heir of Ghenghis Khan; Storm over Asia) USSR, 1928 Director: Vsevolod I. Pudovkin Production: Mezhrabpomfilm (USSR); black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 93 minutes, some sources list 102 minutes; length: 10,144 feet. Released 1928. Re-released 1949 with sound, music by Nicholas Krioukov and text and dialogue by Slavine and V. Koutchoukov. Screenplay: Osip Brik, from a story by I. Novokshenov; photogra- phy: A. N. Golovnya; art directors: Sergei Koslovsky and N. Aaronson. Cast: Valeri Inkishinov (Bair, A Mongol huntsman); I. Inkishinov (Bair’s father); A. Chistyakov (Commander of a partisan detach- ment); A. Dedintsev (Commander of the occupation forces); Anna Sudakevich (His daughter); K. Gurnyak (British soldier with leg- gings); Boris Barnet (British soldier with cat); V. Tzoppi (Mr. Smith, agent of the British fur company); V. Ivanov (Lama); Vladimir Pro (Missionary); Paulina Belinskaya (Wife of the commander of the occupation forces). Publications Books: Yezuitov, N., Poudovkine, ‘‘Pouti Tvortchestva, Les Voies de la création,” Moscow, 1937. Mariamov, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow, 1952. Pudovkin, Vsevolod I., Film Techniques and Film Acting, Lon- don, 1958. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, Vsevolod Poudovkine, Paris, 1966. Rotha, Paul, and Richard Griffith, The Film Till Now, London, 1967. Amengual, Barthélemy, V. I. Poudovkine, Lyons, 1968. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, and Marcel Martin, editors, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Age of the Soviet Film, New York, 1973. Dart, Peter, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York, 1974. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to its Achievement: Journey One, Cinema through 1949, Methuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Sapasnik, Tatiana, and Adi Petrowitsch, Wsewolod Pudovkin; Die Zeit in Grossaufnahme, East Berlin, 1983. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1985. Masi, Stefano, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, Florence, 1985. Articles: Close Up (London), January and February 1929. New Statesman and Nation (London), March 22 1930. New York Times, 8 September 1930. Variety (New York), 10 September 1930. New Yorker, 13 September 1930. Potamkin, Harry, ‘‘Pudovkin and the Revolutionary Film,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), April-June 1933. Leyda, Jay, ‘‘Index to the Creative Work of Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), November 1948. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-September 1953. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1953. Wright, Basil, ‘‘V. I. Pudovkin: 1893–1953,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), October-December 1953. Image et Son (Paris), Summer 1961. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Des Steppes aux rizières,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 10 March 1966. Martin, Marcel, in Cinema (Paris), April 1966. Dupuich, J. J., in Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1972. Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), February 1973. Mairal, J. C., in Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1975. Marks, Geoffrey, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 27 September 1977. Burns, P. E., ‘‘Linkage: Pudovkin’s Classics Revisited,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Summer 1981. Mihalkovic, V., ‘‘‘Potomok Cingiz-hana’, SSSR (1928),’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 5, May 1988. Caruso, U.G., ‘‘La Madre/La fine di San Pietroburgo/Tempeste sull’Asia,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 33, no. 5, June 1993. Dufour, D., ‘‘!Revolutie? (9),’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brus- sels), no. 440, March 1994. *** LA PRIMERA CARGA AL MACHETE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 964 Potomok Chingis-Khan, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s last great silent film, remains a significant cinematic achievement today due largely to the majestic visual sweep of its allegorical conclusion. Through a montage of linked images, the Soviet filmmaker has created a brilliantly symbolic metaphor in which shots of an onrushing horde of mongol horsemen are interspersed with shots of a blowing sand- storm to suggest a gale of righteousness sweeping tyranny from the land. Like many of its Soviet predecessors, Potomok Chingis-Khan is revolutionary in theme, tracing the increasing political awareness of Bair, a young Mongol huntsman who survives a series of indignities at the hands of the Imperialistic White Army to lead his people in revolt. But Pudovkin’s film is also revolutionary in its mode of realization. Like his contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin was a product of the radical ‘‘Kuleshov Workshop’’ which operated on the fringes of the V.G.I.K., the Soviet State Film School. Lev Kuleshov and his followers were early experimenters with a number of techniques of cinematic expression, particularly that of montage. According to Kuleshov, each shot in a filmed sequence possessed two intrinsic values. The first was obviously whatever meaning the shot conveyed as an accurate representation of its subject. However, the second property was the emotional or intellectual significance it acquired as a result of various juxtapositions with other images in a series. Kuleshov and his students felt that it was possible to manipulate the overall meaning of an entire sequence simply by altering the order of occurrence of specific images in relationship to the actors. Pudovkin uses this technique in Potomok Chingis-Khan’s con- cluding sequence to create an extraordinary tension between standard movement in the frame and a series of rapidly moving but conceptu- ally related shots. In fact, fully 25 percent of the more than 2000 shots that comprise the film went into the gallop of the horsemen across the Mongolian landscape. In this sequence, the forward charge of the riders becomes so interspersed with the rapidly moving shots of blowing wind and sand that the actuality of human conflict quickly becomes an abstraction symbolically applicable to all oppressed people throughout history. The impact of the ending is heightened by the fact that Pudovkin deliberately paces the unfolding of the narrative. At the beginning, Bair (Valeri Inkishinov) is a naive youth who takes his family’s most valuable possession, the pelt of a silver fox, to sell at the annual fur market. After he is defrauded by a British fur agent, Inkishinov, under Pudovkin’s direction, allows his character to become increasingly sullen as he seemingly becomes more and more aware of the exploitative nature of the foreigners occupying his homeland. Yet when he is captured and taken to be shot by a White Army corporal after an abortive attempt to retrieve the pelt, he follows his execu- tioner like a trusting puppy who cannot believe that any harm will befall him. The poignant scene ends with a rifle shot. In the interim, the Colonel has discovered an amulet among the boy’s possessions that indicates that he might be a descendant of Ghengis Khan and orders the corporal to retrieve the gravely injured victim and provide him with medical care. The objective is to establish him as a puppet ruler of Buryat Mongolia. Pudovkin, through a series of minor but finely tuned episodes, further darkens the young trapper’s character while in captivity. One of these, in which Bair sees the silver fox fur being worn by the Colonel’s daughter, starts Bair on the road to revolution. He single- handedly wrecks the White Army headquarters, steals a horse, and rides to gather a rebel band who race across the screen in wave after wave against their oppressors. Ultimately, they evolve into an abstract raging windstorm that blows the foreigners from the land. Potomok Chingis-Khan was savaged by Soviet and American critics alike on its opening in 1927 for lacking realism and over- reliance on symbolic devices. Yet today it is recognized as a dynamic narrative, an epic visual poem that effectively demonstrates the power of linked montage to create allegory. Although he made a number of films after Potomok Chingis- Khan, Pudovkin was not able to make the transition to talking pictures. He was at his best as an epic poet employing a purely visual means of expression, and remains of utmost importance to the history of cinema more as a theoretician than as a filmmaker. Yet the films which illustrate his theories (Mother, The End of St. Petersburg and Potomok Chingis-Khan) rank with any of the masterpieces of the silent cinema. —Stephen L. Hanson LA PRIMERA CARGA AL MACHETE (The First Charge of the Machete) Cuba, 1969 Director: Manuel Octavio Gómez Production: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC); black and white, 35mm, Panoramic; running time: 84 minutes. Released 1969. Filmed in Cuba. Screenplay: Manuel Octavio Gómez, Alfredo L. Del Cueto, Jorge Herrera, and Julio García Espinosa; editor: Nelson Rodríguez; sound: Raúl Garcia; music: Leo Brouwer; songs: Pablo Milanés; costume designer: Maria Elena Molinet. Cast: Adolfo Llauradó; Idalia Anreus; Eslinda Nu?ez; Ana Vi?as. Publications Books: Nelson, L., Cuba: The Measure of a Revolution, Minneapolis, 1972. Chanan, Michael, The Cuban Image, London, 1985. Burton, Julianne, editor, Cinema and Social Change in Latin Amer- ica: Conversation with Filmmakers, Austin, Texas, 1986. LA PRIMERA CARGA AL MACHETEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 965 La primera carga al machete Articles: Hablemos de Cine (Lima), no. 54, 1970. Mikko, Pyhala, ‘‘Cuba,’’ in International Film Guide, London, 1971. Díaz Torres, Daniel, in Cine y revolución en Cuba, edited by Santiago Alvarez and others, Barcelona, 1975. Burton, Julianne, ‘‘Popular Culture and Perpetual Quest: An Inter- view with Manuel Octavio Gómez,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), May 1979. Colina, Enrique I., in Cine Cubano (Havana), nos. 56–57. Lopez Morales, E., ‘‘La primera cargapA la luz del tiempo,’’ in Cine Cubano (Habana), no. 122, 1988. Quiros, O., ‘‘Critical Mass of Cuban Cinema: Art as the Vanguard of Society,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 37, no. 3, 1996. *** Even within the context of revolutionary Cuban cinema—distin- guished for its innovations in bringing history to the screen—First Charge is a whole new kind of historical film. Produced as a part of a cycle dedicated to the celebration of ‘‘One Hundred Years of Struggle,’’ the film fuses the political and the poetic into a reconstruc- tion of the 1868 uprising against Spanish colonials and in so doing redefines historical cinema. The experimental nature of First Charge is immediately apparent in the richness of its formal structure. The film is designed to appear as if the technological capabilities (and resulting aesthetic) of cinema verité had been available in 1868. Light hand-held cameras and portable sound equipment produce ‘‘on-the-spot’’ interviews and follow the Cuban rebels into the very center of the battle. This eminently modern ‘‘TV documentary’’ style is complimented, how- ever, by a high-contrast film that resembles ancient newsreel footage and by a manner of posing individuals at the beginning of sequences as if they were in old historical photos. The clash of aesthetics at once so up-to-the-minute and so archaic results in the formal ‘‘dialectical resonance’’ for which Cuban cinema has attained such renown. This formal juxtaposition, and the various techniques contained within it, has a meaning beyond mere experimentation for its own sake. Manuel Octavio Gómez uses this confrontation of past and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII FILMS, 4 th EDITION 966 present to insistently remind viewers that they are seeing an interpre- tation of the historical event, not the event itself. The high-contrast film also functions metaphorically, for it connotes the extremes of the struggle and the reality of sharply opposed interests, in which compromise was impossible. The use of contrast is set up against the grey tones employed in the official pronouncements of the Spanish, which are intended to convey a false impression of tranquility. The hand-held camera and the provocative interviewing style also have connotative functions, for they take on the form of participating in and helping to precipitate the struggle. Gómez’s rejection of the narrative structure traditional in historical cinema is important as well, for, in place of characters with whom one identifies, the film’s central protagonist is the machete—the work tool which became a weapon in 1868 and the weapon of 1868 which is today the tool of Cuba’s economic struggle. Gómez combined extensive historical research with his use of such deliberately anachronistic devices. Cuban and Spanish archives were mined for materials dealing with the struggle, and historical photographs, etchings, and documentary footage were studied in depth. The film’s dialogues are constructed entirely from documents, books, speeches, reports, letters, and anecdotes from the period, and, although it was not possible to reconstruct the language patterns of 1868, the actors were required to immerse themselves in this histori- cal material. Audiences inside and outside of Cuba responded favorably to the film, although some people were put off by the exaggerated expres- sionism of the visual style. At times—most notably in the final battle—the combination of extreme high-contrast film and the widely careening hand-held camera of Jorge Herrera reduce the screen image to a swirling mass of abstract patterns. One critic saw the technique as ‘‘obsessive and vampire-like’’ in detracting from the story-line; Gómez himself acknowledged that the ‘‘brusque and violent’’ camera movements ‘‘molest’’ viewers. However, Gómez defends his film’s style as part of the struggle against the ‘‘routinization’’ of audience and filmmaker. If First Charge does not quite attain the goals set for it by Gómez, that is because he has aimed so high. —John Mraz THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII UK, 1933 Director: Alexander Korda Production: London Film Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 97 minutes; length: 8664 feet. Released 12 October 1933, Radio City Music Hall, released 24 October 1933 in London by United Artists. Filmed in about 5 weeks in London. Cost: about 60,000 pounds. Producer: Alexander Korda; screenplay: Lajos Biro and Arthur Wimperis; photography: Georges Périnal; editors: Stephen Harri- son and Harold Young; art director: Vincent Korda; music: Kurt Schroeder; costume designer: John Armstrong; historical adviser: Peter Lindsey; dance direction: Espinosa; falconry expert: Cap- tain Knight. Cast: Charles Laughton (Henry VIII); Robert Donat (Thomas Culpepper); Franklin Dyall (Thomas Cromwell); Miles Mander (Worthesly); Lawrence Hanray (Archbishop Cranmer); William Aus- tin (Duke of Cleves); John Loder (Peynell); Claude Allister (Cornell); Gibb McLaughlin (French executioner); Sam Livesy (English execu- tioner); William Heughan (Kingston); Merle Oberon (Anne Boleyn); Wendy Barrie (Jane Seymour); Elsa Lanchester (Anne of Cleves); Binnie Barnes (Katherine Howard); Everley Gregg (Katherine Parr); Lady Tree (Nurse). Award: Oscar for Best Actor (Laughton), 1932–33. Publications Script: Biro, Lajos, and Arthur Wimperis, The Private Life of Henry VIII, London, 1934. Books: Balcon, Michael, and others, 20 Years of British Films, 1925–45, London, 1947. Brunel, Adrian, Nice Work: The Story of 30 Years in British Film Production, London, 1949. Tabori, Paul, Alexander Korda, London, 1966. Burrows, Michael, Charles Laughton and Fredric March, Lon- don, 1970. Richards, Jeffrey, Visions of Yesterday, London, 1973. Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles, London, 1975. Korda, Michael, Charmed Lives: A Family Romance, New York, 1979. Lanchester, Elsa, Charles Laughton and I, New York, 1983. Callow, Simon, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, London, 1987. Stockham, Martin, The Korda Collection: Alexander Korda’s Film Classics, Secaucus, 1993. Articles: New York Times, 13 October 1933. Variety (New York), 17 October 1933. Spectator (London), 27 October 1933. Watts, Stephen, ‘‘Alexander Korda and the International Film,’’ in Cinema Quarterly (London), Autumn 1933. Beard, Charles, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1934. Laver, James, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1939. Campbell, Colin, ‘‘The Producer: Sir Alexander Korda,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1951. Gilliat, Sidney, and others, ‘‘Sir Alexander Korda,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Dalrymple, Ian, and others, ‘‘Alexander Korda,’’ in Quarterly Re- view of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Spring 1957. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Intolerant Giant,’’ in Films and Filming (London), March 1963. Vermilye, Jerry, ‘‘Charles Laughton,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1963. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIIIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 967 The Private Life of Henry VIII Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Alexander Korda,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 6, Paris, 1965. Archibald, Lewis, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 3, 1989. Crafton, D., ‘‘The Portrait as Protagonist: The Private Life of Henry VIII,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), Autumn 1992. Tashiro, C.S., ‘‘Fear and Loathing of British Cinema,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 14, no. 2, 1994. Korda, Michael, ‘‘Anglisjskaja avantjura Aleksandra Kordy,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 4, April 1995. Bagh, P. von, ‘‘Kuninkaankuvia,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 1, 1998. *** ‘‘An ace and certainly the finest picture which has come out of England to date,’’ is the way that Variety hailed The Private Life of Henry VIII, a feature generally considered to be the first British film to have had an international impact (although certainly not the first British film to be screened in the United States, where English features had been seen from the early ‘teens). The Private Life of Henry VIII was very much an international production: it starred Charles Laughton, a major stage and screen actor from England, and was produced by Hungarian-born Alexander Korda and photographed by the French Georges Périnal. Wisely, to emphasize that his film was no mere British feature, Alexander Korda gave The Private Life of Henry VIII its world premiere at New York’s Radio Music Hall on October 12, 1933, two weeks prior to the London premiere. A jovial film which equates the joy of sex with the pleasure of food, The Private Life of Henry VIII depicts the British Monarch’s personal relationship with five of his six wives. The film does not bother with Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon: an opening title explains that she was too respectable. The actresses portraying three of the remaining wives—Merle Oberon, Binnie Barnes and Elsa Lanchester—were later to become familiar players in Hollywood films, as was Robert Donat (as Thomas Culpepper). Charles Laughton received an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, making The Private Life of Henry VIII the first British feature to be so honored. Alexander Korda always maintained that the idea for the film came to him when he heard a London cab driver singing the popular Music Hall song, ‘‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I Am.’’ Another, more LE PROCES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 968 sensible, explanation for Korda’s decision to make the film is that he was seeking a suitable vehicle for Charles Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, and a statue of Henry VIII made the producer aware of the resemblance between the Monarch and the actor. The film was shot in a mere five weeks at a reported cost of ￡60,000. What contemporary audiences particularly enjoyed and what makes The Private Life of Henry VIII still entertaining is the film’s comedy, particularly the dialogue between Henry and Anne of Cleves, with the former’s oft-quoted line as he enters the bedchamber, ‘‘The things I’ve done for England!’’ The film has an elegance and a charm created in part by Vincent Korda’s set and Périnal’s photog- raphy. Alexander Korda’s direction is little more than adequate and relies heavily on the quality performances delivered by his players. —Anthony Slide LE PROCES (The Trial) France-West Germany-Italy, 1962 Director: Orson Welles Production: Paris Europa Productions, Hisa-Film (West Germany), and FI.C.IT (Italy); black and white, 35mm; running time: 120 minutes. English and German versions: 118 minutes. Italian version: 100 minutes. Released December 1962, Paris. Filmed 26 March 1962-June 1962 in the Studio de Boulogne; and on location in Paris and Zagreb. Producers: Yves Laplanche, Miguel Salkind and Alexander Salkind with Robert Florat; screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel by Franz Kafka; photography: Edmond Richard; editor: Yvonne Martin; sound engineer: Guy Vilette; sound mixer: Jacques Lebreton; art director: Jean Mandaroux; set dressers: Jean Charpentier and Francine Coureau; scenic artist: André Labussière; music: Jean Ledrut; special effects editor: Denise Baby; costume designers: Helene Thibault with Mme. Brunet and Claudie Thary. Cast: Anthony Perkins (Joseph K); Jean Moreau (Miss Burstner); Romy Schneider (Leni); Elsa Martinelli (Hilda); Suzanne Flon (Pittle); Orson Welles (Hastler); Akin Tamiroff (Bloch); Madeleine Robinson (Mrs. Grubach); Arnoldo Foà (Inspector A); Fernand Ledoux (Chief clerk); Michel Lonsdale (Priest); Max Buchsbaum (Examining mag- istrate); Max Haufler (Uncle Max); Maurice Teynac (Deputy man- ager); Wolfgang Reichmann (Courtroom guard); Thomas Holtzmann (Bert); Billy Kearns and Jess Hahn (Assistant inspectors); Maydra Shore (Irmie); Carl Studer (Man in leather); Jean-Claude Remoleux and Raoul Delfosse (Policemen); Titorelli (X). Publications Script: Welles, Orson, The Trial, New York, 1970. Books: Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, London, 1965. Wollen, Peter, Orson Welles, London, 1969. Bessy, Maurice, Orson Welles: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, New York, 1971. Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles, Berkeley, 1971. Bogdanovich, Peter, and Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1972. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles, London, 1972. Cowie, Peter, A Ribbon of Dreams, New York, 1973. Wagner, Geoffrey, The Novel and the Cinema, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1975. Gottesman, Ronald, editor, Focus on Orson Welles, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1976. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles: Actor and Director, New York, 1977. Bazin, André, Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York, 1978. Naremore, J., The Magic World of Orson Welles, New York, 1978. Valentinetti, Claudio M., Orson Welles, Florence, 1981. Bergala, Alain, and Jean Narboni, editors, Orson Welles, Paris, 1982. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, New York, 1985. Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography, New York, 1985. Parra, Daniele, and Jacques Zimmer, Orson Welles, Paris, 1985. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, editors, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York, 1985. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles: A Celebration, London, 1986. Cotten, Joseph, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, New York, 1987. Wood, Bret, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1990. Howard, James, The Complete Films of Orson Welles, Secaucus, 1991. Beja, Morris, Perspective on Orson Welles, New York, 1995. Thomson, David, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, New York, 1996. Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, New York, 1997. Welles, Orson, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1998. Articles: Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Heroes of Welles,’’ in Film (London), March- April 1961. ‘‘Prodigal Revived,’’ in Time (New York), 29 June 1962. ‘‘Orson Welles,’’ in Film (London), Autumn 1962. Fleischer, Richard, ‘‘Case for the Defense,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1962. Martinez, Enrique, ‘‘The Trial of Orson Welles,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1962. Gretchen, F., and Herman Weinberg, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1963. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, February 1963. Pechter, William, ‘‘Trials,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1963–64. Labarthe, André S., ‘‘Pour introduire au procès d’Orson Welles,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 February 1963. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 21 February 1963. Shivas, Mark, in Movie (London), February-March 1963. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), March 1963. Lane, John Francis, in Films and Filming (London), March 1963. Callenbach, Ernest, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1963. Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), December 1963. LE PROCESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 969 Le Procès PROFESSIONE: REPORTER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 970 Cobos, Juan, Miguel Rubio, and J. A. Pruneda, ‘‘A Trip to Quixoteland: Conversations with Orson Welles,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), June 1966. Nevitt, Brian, in Take One (Montreal), September-October 1966. Daney, Serge, ‘‘Welles in Power,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), September 1967. Bosseno, C., in Image et Son (Paris), May 1973. Carroll, N., ‘‘Welles and Kafka,’’ in Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 3, 1978. Goodwin, J., ‘‘Orson Welles’ The Trial: Cinema and Dream,’’ in Dreamworks, Fall 1981. ‘‘L’Image des mots,’’ in Amis du Film et de la Télévision (Paris), March 1982. Lev, P., ‘‘Three Adaptations of The Trial,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), July 1984. Beja, M., ‘‘Where You Can’t Get at Him: Orson Welles and the Attempt to Escape from Father,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), January 1985. Edelman, P., ‘‘Sans laisser d’addresse,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1985. Berthome, J.-P., and F. Thomas, ‘‘Sept anneen noir et blanc,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1992. Thomas, F., ‘‘Michael Lonsdale et Le Proces,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 378, July/August 1992. Nielsen, N.-A., ‘‘Magten: et sporgsmal om tid,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1993. Friedman, R. -M., ‘‘La specularite diffractee: mise en abyme et debut de film,’’ in Semiotica, vol. 112, no. 1/2, 1996. Dottorini, D., ‘‘Il cinema come ri-narrazione,’’ in Filmcritica (Siena), vol. 46, no. 466, July 1996. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘The Trial,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 47, 1998. *** Orson Welles would seem to be the perfect director to bring the tortured fiction of Franz Kafka to the screen. The deep chiaroscuro, mordant humor, and labyrinthian qualities of his films are sufficiently Kafkaesque to suggest a sympathetic match between novelist and filmmaker. Yet the filmed version of The Trial brought forth a chorus of negative reviews, especially from the Anglo-American press. Plagued by its own set of problems (and what recent Welles film has not been), The Trial elicited as violent and negative notices on its initial release as any garnered by a major director within recent memory. It was a critical lashing that has been salved only recently by those film commentators who have had the luxury of a broader perspective with which to consider The Trial within the context of the development of Welles’s cinema. The initial problems Welles encountered were due to his having adapted a modern literary classic, provoking a spate of reviews comparing Welles’s adaptation to the original story, and since Welles had had the audacity to tamper with the novel’s plot line, such as it is, he fell afoul of the critics. The largest discrepancy between the film and the fiction, however, was in Welles’s making of Joseph K into a more active character. Welles later admitted in an interview that the passivity of Kafka’s anti-hero just did not fit with his own world view. After the death camps and advent of the atomic age, Welles felt that Kafka’s morality tale needed updating, and in typical Wellesian style he did so. The major problems the critics pounced on had less to do with the film’s faithfulness, however, than with the film’s opacity. A number of critics claimed that the film was even less understandable than the book; furthermore, they found the movie boring. The attacks against The Trial remained fairly uniform in British and American papers and weekly magazines. In more recent assessments of Welles’s career— James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles, for example— the film has received much more careful and appreciative treatment. Naremore finds the movie a fascinating study of repressed sexuality, and he is at pains to place the film within the Welles canon, especially by making comparisons with The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil. If the film remains little shown today, at least it has assumed a respectful place for students of Welles’s cinema. The Trial may not be much liked, but at least it is now dealt with. Even one of the movie’s most severe critics, William Pechter, admitted that in spite of its overall failure, Welles had pushed mise- en-scène beyond any concern for narrative or dramatic necessity into a realm of purely visual effects, into the realm of pure cinema. At least Pechter found the experiment an interesting one. The use of the abandoned railway station as the central office set, which caused one critic to remark that the film seemed dominated by its decor, produced a brilliantly evocative visual representation of the post-war world. Moreover for Peter Cowie, The Trial is Welles’s finest film since Citizen Kane, partly because it conveys so perfectly ‘‘the terrifying vision of the modern world’’ that is characteristic of Kafka’s novel and partly because the film so clearly bears the stamp of Welles’s personality, to rival only Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil in this respect. Cowie wrote that Welles had succeeded in not only translat- ing the book into film but also in creating a cinematic environment that revealed the complexity of Kafka’s world and reflected the inability of the human mind to grasp complexity which is ‘‘the tragic moral of the novel and of this extraordinary, hallucinatory film.’’ —Charles L. P. Silet PROFESSIONE: REPORTER (The Passenger) Italy-France-Spain, 1975 Director: Michelangelo Antonioni Production: Compagnia Cinematografica Champion (Rome), Les Films Concordia (Paris), and C.I.P.I. Cinematografica (Madrid); Metrocolor, 35mm; running time: 126 minutes. Released March 1975, Italy. Filmed on location in England, Spain, and Germany. Producer: Carlo Ponti; screenplay: Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Michelangelo Antonioni, from an original idea by Mark Peploe; PROFESSIONE: REPORTERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 971 Professione: Reporter photography: Luciano Tovoli; editors: Franco Arcalli and Michel- angelo Antonioni; sound: Cyril Collik; sound editors: Sandro Peticca and Franca Silvi; sound mixer: Franco Ancillai; production de- signer: Osvaldo Desideri; art director: Piero Poletto; costume designer: Louise St. Jensward. Cast: Jack Nicholson (Locke); Maria Schneider (The Girl); Jenny Runacre (Rachel); Ian Hendry (Knight); Stephen Berkoff (Stephen); Ambroise Bea (Achebe); Jose Maria Cafarel (Hotel manager); James Campbell (Stregone); Manfred Spies (Tedesco); Jean Baptiste Tiemele (The African); Chuch McVehill or Mulvehill (Robertson); Angel del Pozo (Police inspector); Narcisse Pula (African’s accomplice). Publications Script: Antonioni, Michelangelo, Mark Peploe, and Peter Wollen, Professione: Reporter, Bologna and New York 1975. Books: Rifkin, Ned, Antonioni’s Visual Language, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Downing, David, Jack Nicholson: A Biography, London, 1983. Barthes, Roland, and others, Michelangelo Antonioni, Munich, 1984. Biarese, Cesare, and Aldo Tassone, I film di Michelangelo Antonioni, Rome, 1985. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Antonioni, Michelangelo, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director, Oxford and New York, 1986. Perry, Ted, and Rene Prieto, Michelangelo Antonioni: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Johnson, Charles W., Philosophy in Literature, San Francisco, 1992. Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni: The Poet of Images, New York, 1995. Chatman, Seymour B., Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1996. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, New York, 1998. Tomasulo, Michelangelo Antonioni, Old Tappan, 1998. Wenders, Wim, My Time with Antonioni, New York, 2000. PROFESSIONE: REPORTER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 972 Articles: Filmcritica (Rome), March 1975. Plumb, C., in Take One (Montreal), May 1975. Reilly, C. P., in Films in Review (New York), May 1975. Atwell, L., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1975. Cowie, Peter, in Focus on Film (London), Summer 1975. Roud, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London) Summer 1975. Rosebaum, Jonathan, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1975. Demby, B. J., ‘‘Michelangelo Antonioni Discusses The Passenger,’’ in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), July 1975. Epstein, R., ‘‘Antonioni Speaks . . . and Listens,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1975. Perry, T., ‘‘Men and Landscapes: Antonioni’s The Passenger,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1975. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), August 1975. Giroux, H. A., in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1975. Gliserman, M., ‘‘The Passenger: An Individual in History,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), August-September 1975. Offroy, D., in Cinématographe (Paris), August-September 1975. Walsh, M., ‘‘The Passenger: Antonioni’s Narrative Design,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), August-September 1975. Benoit, C., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. ‘‘Profession: Reporter: Un Film de Michelangelo Antonioni,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1975. Stewart, G., ‘‘Exhumed Identity: Antonioni’s Passenger to Nowhere,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1975–76. Tuominen, T., ‘‘Fuuga Antonionin tapaan, Michaelangelo Antonioni: Ammatti: Reportteri,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 1, 1976. Bonitzer, P., ‘‘Désir désert (Profession reporter),’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1976. Bachmann, Gideon, ‘‘Maria Schneider: ‘ik houd niet echt van acteren’,’’ in Skoop (Wagenengen), March 1976. Bojtar, E., ‘‘A riportut vege: Antonioni: Figlalkozasa: Riporter,’’ in Filmcultura (Budapest), July-August 1976. Dick, P., ‘‘The Passenger and Literary Existentialism,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Winter 1977. Colombo, Furio, ‘‘Visual Structures in a Film by Antonioni,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), November 1977. MacLean, R., ‘‘The Passenger and Reporting: Photographic Mem- ory,’’ in Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 3, 1978. Price, T., ‘‘Film Maudit: The Political and Religious Meaning of Antonioni’s The Passenger,’’ in Cinemonkey (Portland, Oregan), vol. 5, no. 2, 1979. Lockhart, Kimball, ‘‘Empêchement visuel et point de fuite dans L’avventura et Profession: Reporter,’’ in Camera/Stylo (Paris), November 1982. Tovoli, L., ‘‘Tecnicamente dolce il mio incontro con Antonioni,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Rome), November-December 1989. Turner, J., ‘‘The Passenger, Lacan, and the Real,’’ in Post Script (Commerce, Texas), no. 1–2, 1989–90. Eldh, M., ‘‘Roman son filmkritik,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 33, no. 4, 1991. Tomasulo, F. P., ‘‘The Architectonics of Alienation: Antonioni’s Edifice Complex,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), no. 3, 1993. Atkinson, M., ‘‘Jack Nicholson in The Passenger,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 8, July 1997. Pellizzari, L., ‘‘Sbarre,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 37, no. 366, July/August 1997. *** After the general confusion prompted by Zabriskie Point, Michel- angelo Antonioni’s previous feature, Professione: Reporter (distrib- uted in the United States as The Passenger) met with critical and popular acclaim. This success may have been due as much to the cast as to either a new ‘‘transparency’’ in Antonioni’s direction or a suddenly acquired sophistication of the filmgoer. Though Professione: Reporter, like Zabriskie Point and for that matter any of Antonioni’s previous films, de-emphasizes classic cinematic narrative in favor of the presentation of an essentially static/dramatic situation through experimentation with expressive elements specific to film—thereby remaining what the general public would see as a ‘‘difficult’’ film: ‘‘nothing happens’’ with which one can ‘‘identify’’—Professione: Reporter’s stars, Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, were two of 1975’s biggest box-office draws. Their appearance guaranteed the film a degree of financial success (necessary after Zabriskie Point), but also introduced a marked artificiality into the fabric of the film’s fiction—Jack Nicholson virtually plays himself, all the more empha- sized by the implausible turning point of the film’s plot: the Nicholson character gives up his own identity to assume the identity of a man who happens to die and happens to resemble him. The presumption that such an arbitrary exchange of identities might be either workable or desirable seems to comment on the nature of acting; and later in the film when Maria Schneider finds a gun in Nicholson’s luggage, he takes it away from her with an ironic monotone ‘‘no’’ which cannot fail to recall, intertextually, yet another gun, the one Schneider used to kill an even bigger box-office draw, Marlon Brando, in the film that made her famous and which is no doubt responsible for her appear- ance in this film, namely, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). But the real interest in Professione: Reporter lies in its groundbreaking technique, one that explicitly works in opposition to the film’s narrative continuity and impression of reality, effects that both mainstream critics and the general public expect of any feature film. The most discussed technical innovation concerns the film’s next-to-the-last seven minute-long continuous traveling shot which moves foward into the frame at an almost imperceptible rate and which impossibly passes through the narrow iron bars of a window and into a courtyard only to come back to the same window to look through the same bars to view the same Nicholson the shot first framed but which upon return finds him dead. This shot is emblematic of a radical strategy Antonioni has since pursued in an even more global fashion in Il mistero di Oberwald (1979) and Identificazione di una donna (1982), whereby elements taken to belong exclusively to filmic technique, elements such as camera movement, framing, point of view, sound, and image tone, which are normally considered to be neutral vehicles for the transparent expression of a narrative—find themselves emphatically motivated, bearing the principal burden of signification in the face of an increasingly banal ‘‘story.’’ Such is the case in Professione: Reporter. Preparing the ground for these later films, and perpetuating a research Antonioni has engaged since the films of the early 1950s, the innovative technique of Professione: PROSHCHANIEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 973 Reporter proposes nothing short of the fictionalization of tech- nique itself. —Kimball Lockhart PROSHCHANIE (Farewell) USSR, 1981 Director: Elem Klimov Production: Mosfilm; in color; running time: 126 minutes; length: 11,359 feet. Released 1981. Released in USA in 1983. Producers: A. Rasskazov, G. Sokolova; screenplay: Larissa Shepitko, Rudolf Tyurin, and Herman Klimov, from the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin; photography: Alexei Rodionov, Yuri Skhirtladze, Sergei Taraskin; editor: V. Byelova; sound recordist: B. Vengerovsky; art director: V. Petrov; music: Artyomov, A. Shnitke. Cast: Stefaniya Stayuta (Darya); Lev Durov (Pavel); Alexei Petrenko (Vorontsov); Leonid Kryuk (Petrukha); Vadim Yakovenko (Andrei); Yuri Katin-Yartsev (Bogodul); Denis Luppov (Kolyanya); Maiya Bulgakova, Naidan Gendunova, Galina Demina, Anna Kustova, Lyubov Malinovskaya, Nadezhda Pogorishnaya, Liudmila Polyakova (Darya’s Friends); I. Bezyaev, M. Bichkov, Yu. Puchkov, V. Klap (Fire Brigade). Publications Books: Romanenko, Aelita Romanovna, Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko, translated by Natalia Shevyrina, Moscow, 1990. Articles: Interview with Elem Klimov, in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), June-Septem- ber 1983. Variety (New York), 3 August 1983. Martin, Marcel, and C. Zander, ‘‘Cinéastes soviétiques à la recherche de leurs racines: Entretien avec Elem Klimov,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), December 1983-January 1984. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), January 1987. Films and Filming (London), April 1987. Listener (London), 30 April 1987, and 12 May 1988. Petit, Chris, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1987. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), May-June 1987. Makkonen, V., ‘‘Elem Klimov elokuviensa takana,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 6, 1988. Hollywood Reporter, 23 February 1988. Lafontaine, Y., ‘‘Les adieux a matiora,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 43, Summer 1989. *** As the white-raincoated officials from the mainland emerge from the mist we get the feeling of the doom that is to overtake the little island of Matyora and its people. It is to be flooded to become part of a vast Siberian hydro-electric project. We switch immediately to the people of the island and their way of life, which is depicted with great understanding of their essentially happy existence rooted in a love of nature and of traditions which go back to pagan origins. In a film with such tragic implications there is, however, much gaiety which makes more poignant the inevitable ending. The island is sacrificed to progress. Engineers come and go. Arrangements are made for the evacuation which must take place. There are those, however, who prefer to remain in their homes and face death in the shadow of their ancestors. Klimov made the film in 1981, having taken it over from his wife Larissa Shepitko who was killed in a car accident. She had also written the script in collaboration with Klimov’s brother Herman. It was based on a novel by the Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin. As with so many of Klimov’s films it did not meet with official approval and was shelved for many years until his spectacular assignment to the powerful position of head of Soviet cinema under the glasnost policies of Gorbachov. Klimov, hitherto noted for his satirical and critical qualities, proves himself very sympathetic and understanding to the village life he depicts in this film. It is visually rich in its gallery of peasant faces, and the village life is portrayed with warmth and liveliness. Music plays a part in the lives of the people and there is a joyous village festival in which outside influences impinge on the supposedly isolated ambience of the peasants. Television is not unknown, of course, and the exploration of other planets, as well as boogie- woogie, are part of their knowledge. But to them the mainland across the vast expanse of water is hostile to their community life together. The brutal demands of progress will not respect their feelings. The destruction of their graveyard arouses them to action. Soon the first departures take place. Little details build up. The old lady searches frantically for her cat. Another, after locking up her house, looks back anxiously as a pile of logs collapses. The houses are closed up, and small domestic objects are rescued. Some of the houses are burnt. One house is washed and cleaned as if it was going to last for ever. All these things take us into the mind of the tragedy. The invocation of the spirit of the earth by old Darya is central to the film, and emphasises the pantheistic beliefs of the people. It may not be a paradise they are leaving but the anguish of the heart is just as great. Following hard upon Darya’s wanderings through the wood, three men appear on their way to fell an ancient tree. The peasants are ordered to burn their houses before leaving. They depart in groups but Darya and some others prefer to remain and perish in the flood waters. Watching the film one recalls the great traditions of the earlier Russian film-makers like Eisenstein and Dovzhenko whose spirit informs the film at so many points (the rough peasant faces and the toilworn hands who draw their strength from the land). The beauty of PSYCHO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 974 nature and its seasons, the poetry of rain and shine are photographed with loving care and given extra meaning to the sadness of the film. Matyora, deserted, faces the vast expanse of water which will in due course engulf it and something of value on this earth will disappear. —Liam O’Leary PSYCHO USA, 1960 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Universal Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 109 minutes. Released June 1960, originally by Paramount. Filmed on Universal backlots, interiors filmed at Revue Studios, locations shot on Route 99 of the Fresno-Bakersfield Highway and in the San Fernando Valley. Cost: $800,000. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay: Joseph Stefano, from a novel by Robert Bloch; photography: John L. Russell; editor: George Tomasini; sound engineer: Walden O. Watson and William Russell; production designers: Joseph Hurley, Robert Claworthy, and George Milo; music: Bernard Herrmann; special effects: Clar- ence Champagne; costume designer: Helen Colvig; pictorial con- sultant: Saul Bass. Cast: Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates); Janet Leigh (Marion Crane); Vera Miles (Lila Crane); John Gavin (Sam Loomis); Martin Balsam (Milton Arbogast); John McIntyre (Sheriff Chambers); Lurene Tuttle (Mrs. Chambers); Simon Oakland (Dr. Richmond); Frank Albertson (Tom Cassidy); Pat Hitchcock (Caroline); Vaughn Taylor (George Lowery); John Anderson (Car salesman); Mort Mills (Policeman); Sam Flint, Francis De Sales, George Eldredge (Officials); Alfred Hitchcock (Man outside real estate office). Publications Script: Stefano, Joseph, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, edited by Richard J. Anobile, New York, 1974. Books: Bogdanovitch, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. Manz, Hans-Peter, Alfred Hitchcock, Zurich, 1962. Perry, George, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1965. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965. Truffaut, Francois, Le Cinema selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Simsolo, No?l, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1969. La Valley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Naremore, James, A Filmguide to Pyscho, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Spoto, Donald, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1976. Derry, Charles, Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Mod- ern Horror Film, New York, 1977. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Thomson, David, Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking, New York, 1981. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Wollen, Peter, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, London, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1982; London, 1983. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Barbier, Philippe, and Jacques Moreau, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Bruce, Graham, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Hogan, David J., Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die Dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcocks, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1986. Rebello, Stephen, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, New York, 1990, 1998. Leigh, Janet, Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, New York, 1995. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Condon, Pauline, Complete Hitchcock, London, 1999. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, 1999. Bellour, Raymond, The Analysis of Film, Bloomington, 2000. McGilligan, Patrick, Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 2001. Articles: Domarchi, Jean, and Jean Douchet, interview with Hitchcock, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1959. Hitchcock, Alfred, ‘‘Pourquoi j’ai peur la nuit,’’ in Arts (Paris), June 1960. PSYCHOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 975 Psycho Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 17 June 1960. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 11 August 1960. Callenbach, Ernest, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1960. Dyer, Peter, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1960. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), September 1960. Demonsablon, Philippe, ‘‘Lettre de New York,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1960. Kaplan, Nelly, ‘‘Je suis une légende,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), October 1960. Allombert, Guillaume, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), November 1960. Douchet, Jean, ‘‘Hitchcock et son public,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1960. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Psychanalyse de Pyscho,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1960. Boisset, Yves, interview with Hitchcock, in Cinéma (Paris), Janu- ary 1961. Ian, Cameron, and V. F. Perkins, interview with Hitchcock, in Movie (London), 6 January 1963. Bean, Robin, ‘‘Pinning Down the Quicksilver,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July 1965. Hardison, O. B. ‘‘The Rhetoric of Hitchcock’s Thrillers,’’ in Man at the Movies, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967. Braudy, Leo, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1968. Nogueira, Rui, ‘‘Pyscho, Rosie and a Touch of Orson: Janet Leigh Talks,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1970. Gough-Yates, Kevin, ‘‘Private Madness and Public Lunacy,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1972. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Psycho Therapy,’’ in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice New York, 1973. Tarnowski, J. F., ‘‘De quelques points de théorie du cinéma,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1975. Almendarez, Valentin, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 21 September 1978. Bellour, Raymond, ‘‘Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion,’’ in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), nos. 3–4, 1979. Thomson, David, ‘‘The Big Hitch,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1979. Bikácsy, G., ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), Sep- tember-October 1979. Telotte, J. P., ‘‘Faith and Idolatry in the Horror Film,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1980. Verstappen, W., ‘‘De eenvoud van Hitchcock,’’ in Skoop (Amster- dam), April 1981. Crawford, L., ‘‘Segmenting the Filmic Text,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapo- lis), Fall 1981-Spring 1982. Klinger, Barbara, ‘‘Psycho: The Institutionalization of Female Sexu- ality,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 5 no. 3, 1983. PSYCHO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 976 Anderson, Paul, in Starburst (London), January 1985. Thomson, David, in Film Comment (New York), January-Febru- ary 1985. Matthew-Walker, R., ‘‘Hitchcock’s Little Joke,’’ in Films and Film- ing (London), July 1986. Tanner, L., interview with Anthony Perkins, in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1986. Palmer, R. Barton, ‘‘The Metafictional Hitchcock: The Experience of Viewing and the Viewing of Experience in Rear Window and Psycho,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Winter 1986. Cardullo, B., ‘‘Some Notes on Classic Films,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 2, 1990. Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 11, 1990. Rebello, S., ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock Goes Psycho,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), April 1990. Bruno, M. W., ‘‘Bates Motel,’’ in Segnocinema (Vincenza, Italy), September-October 1990. Recchia, E., ‘‘Through a Shower Curtain Darkly: Reflexitivity as a Dramatic Component of Psycho,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1991. Sterritt, D., ‘‘The Diabolic Imagination: Hitchcock, Bakhtin, and the Carnivalization of Cinema,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier, Ohio), no. 1, 1992. Janisch, A., in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 10, 1993. Heijer, J., ‘‘Hitchcock’s Psycho in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters,’’ in Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Ottawa), vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 1994. Williams, Linda, ‘‘Learning to Scream,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 12, December 1994. Fischer, Dennis K., ‘‘Psycho with Limits,’’ in Outré (Evanston), vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1995. Hall, John W., ‘‘Touch of Psycho? Hitchcock’s Debt to Welles,’’ in Bright Lights (Cincinnati), no. 14, 1995. Morrison, K., ‘‘The Technology of Homicide: Constructions of Evidence and Truth in American Murder Films,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 38, September 1995. Ankerich, Michael, ‘‘Psyched-Up for Psycho: Janet Leigh Remem- bers the Classic Thriller on the Eve of its 35th Anniversary,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 243, September 1995. Morris, Christopher D., ‘‘Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing,’’ in Litera- ture/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 1, January 1996. Caminer, Sylvia, and John Andrew Gallagher, ‘‘Joseph Stefano,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 47, no. 1–2, January-Febru- ary 1996. Negra, Diane, ‘‘Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Nor- man Bates, and Buffalo Bill,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 24, no. 2, April 1996. Griffith, James, ‘‘Psycho: Not Guilty as Charged,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 4, July-August 1996. Fischer, D., ‘‘A Conversation with Janet Leigh: ‘Not Just a Screamer!’’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 58, October/January 1996/1997. Thomas, D., ‘‘On Being Norman: Performance and Inner Life in Hitchcock’s Psycho,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 44, 1997. Thomson, D., ‘‘Ten Films that Showed Hollywood How to Live,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 8, July 1997. Lucas, Tim, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 47, 1998. *** There are those for whom Alfred Hitchcock is a ‘‘master of suspense’’ the premier technician of the classical narrative cinema; there are those for whom Hitchcock’s mastery of film technique, of ‘‘pure cinema’’ as he liked to call it, amount to a species of pandering, or even of an audience-directed cruelty; there are others for whom Hitchcock’s fables of emotions trapped and betrayed are seen as self- reflexive, enticing the viewer to participate in the drama of suspense only to call that participation into moral question; and, finally, there are those who find in Hitchcock’s films submerged allegories of grace, of mistakes acknowledged, redeemed, and transcended. Despite such general differences of opinion, however, it is commonly agreed among Hitchcock scholars that Psycho raised the issue of Hitchcock’s artistic status and intentions (or lack thereof) in its purest form, as if it were his most essential, most essentially Hitchcockian, film. Indeed, the shower murder sequence in Psycho—wherein Janet Leigh’s almost confessional cleansing is cut short by the knife wielding ‘‘Mrs. Bates’’—is frequently cited as a textbook instance of cinematic suspense and formal (montage) perfection. Moreover, it is this murder of the film’s ostensible heroine, roughly a third of the way through the narrative, that most critics focus on when discussing the significance of the entire film, as if it were the film writ small, as if the film were itself an act of murder that we are commanded, via Hitchcock’s expert use of subjective camera, to take part and pleasure in. Two kinds of evidence are typically invoked to support such a reading of Psycho and of Hitchcock generally. One of these is Hitchcock’s lifelong commitment to popular cinematic genres, mainly the thriller. The underlying premise here is that Hitchcock had ample opportunity to break out of the thriller format, to become an ‘‘artist’’ in the way that Fellini and Antonioni are (it is often pointed out that Psycho and L’avventura were released within a year of each other), so that his apparent decision not to do so can be read as a matter either of obsession (as if he feared to) or satisfaction (as if he aspired no higher). And underlying this premise is the conviction that popular genres, of their very nature, are inimical to serious art, are too much the product of popular tastes and box-office calculation to allow for humane insights or serious artistic self-expression—hence O. B. Hardison’s argument that Hitchcock is less an artist than a ‘‘rhetorician.’’ A second sort of evidence is also cited to support the claim that neither Hitchcock nor Psycho need be taken seriously—his comments to interviewers, especially regarding his working methods and inten- tions. Hitchcock’s description of Psycho as ‘‘a fun picture,’’ one that takes its audience through an emotional process ‘‘like taking them through the haunted house at the fairground’’ (in Movie 6), is a notorious instance of this apparent dissociation between the serious- ness of his ostensible subjects (crime, murder, sexuality) and the triviality of Hitchcock’s approach. As David Thomson puts it, ‘‘Psycho is just the cocky leer of evil genius flaunting tragic material but never brave enough to explore it.’’ The case against Psycho is grounded in a reading of intention and effect, the charge being that Hitchcock’s intentions are mercenary and that the effect of the film is a kind of brutality, directed equally at the film’s characters and its audience. The accepted case for the film follows a similar line of reasoning, though to different conclusions. Thus critics like Robin Wood and Leo Braudy would agree that in Psycho Hitchcock ‘‘forces the audience . . . to face the most sinister connotations of our audience role’’ by playing with, yet disturbing, our normal expectation ‘‘that our moral sympathies and our aesthetic sympathies [will] remain fixed throughout the movie.’’ Our desire to ‘‘identify’’ with sympathetic characters is thus called increasingly THE PUBLIC ENEMYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 977 into question as our ‘‘identification’’ shifts from the reasonably normal Marion Crane to the seemingly normal Norman Bates—who finally becomes ‘‘Mrs. Bates’’ in an epiphany of confused identity. Indeed, it is this voyeuristic tendency to identify with others, or to identify them as the views we take of them, often without their knowledge, that the film calls into ethical doubt, forcing viewers ‘‘to see the dark potentialities within all of us.’’ Such arguments for and against Psycho are problematic, however, on several counts—not the least of which is the common assumption that the film, of its very essence, is ‘‘naturally voyeuristic.’’ Is it more or less voyeuristic than still photography, or painting, or sight generally? Also a problem is the clear implication in both arguments that audience response is so thoroughly under Hitchcock’s control that ‘‘the spectator becomes the chief protagonist.’’ Upon what grounds can we claim to know how all members of a given audience, much less all members of all possible audiences, will respond to a particular film? Furthermore, what warrants our generalizing from predicted audience response to authorial intention? And of what relevance is intention to our evaluation of Psycho in any event? Much discussion of Psycho assumes that our decision to take Psycho seriously as a work of art depends upon our reading of Hitchcock’s intentions regarding it; but one can more reasonably argue that the very decision to treat the film as an aesthetic object renders intention irrelevant. As Stanley Cavell puts it, all that matters for our experi- ence of any film is ‘‘in front of your eyes.’’ A final reason for doubting the wisdom of the accepted approaches to Psycho is the focus they place on individual psychology, of the characters, of the viewer, at the expense of other facts of the text. One such fact, often read as an Hitchcockian irrelevancy (a ‘‘MacGuffin’’), is money—as personified by the oil-rich Mr. Cassidy and as an implicit factor in the attitudes and actions of nearly every major character. It is Sam’s lack of money that prompts Marion in the first place to steal Cassidy’s $40,000. Sam and Lila assume that money is behind Norman’s silence regarding Marion (Norman himself hints that money played a part in the relationship of his widowed mother to her lover); the Sheriff assumes that money is behind Arbogast’s disap- pearance. Indeed, Psycho can be read as a meditation on money and its effects—negative effects as far as the film’s characters are con- cerned, but also positive effects in regard to the audience, or at least in regard to those members of the audience who take Psycho seriously as a warning of the deadly effects that money can have. It is in such terms that the audience can become an implicit ‘‘character’’ in the film— the character who does benefit from the past mistakes and who is therefore capable of transcending them. —Leland Poague THE PUBLIC ENEMY USA, 1931 Director: William Wellman Production: Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes. Released May 1931. Filmed February- March 1931 in Warner Bros. studios. Cost: $151,000. Producer: Darryl Zanuck; screenplay: Kubec Glasmon and John Bright; adaptation and dialogue: Harvey Thew, from a story ‘‘Beer and Blood’’ by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright; photography: Dev Jennings; editor: Ed McCormick; art director: Max Parker; music conductor: David Mendoza; costume designer: Earl Luick. Cast: James Cagney (Tom Powers); Jean Harlow (Gwen Allen); Edward Woods (Matt Doyle); Joan Blondell (Mamie); Beryl Mercer (Ma Powers); Donald Cook (Mike Powers); Mae Clark (Kitty); Leslie Fenton (Nails Nathan); Robert Emmett O’Connor (Paddy Ryan); Murray Kinnell (Putty Nose); Ben Hendricks, Jr. (Bugs Moran); Rita Flynn (Molly Doyle); Clark Burroughs (Dutch); Snitz Edwards (Hack Miller); Adele Watson (Mrs. Doyle); Frank Coghlan, Jr. (Tom as a boy); Frankie Darro (Matt as a boy); Purnell Pratt (Officer Powers); Mia Marvin (Jane); Robert E. Homans (Pat Burke); Dorothy Gee (Nail’s girl); Lee Phelps (Steve the bartender); Ben Hendricks III (Bugs as a boy); Landers Stevens (Doctor); Eddie Kane (Joe, the headwaiter); Douglas Gerrard (Assistant tailor); Sam McDaniel (Black headwaiter); William H. Strass (Pawnbroker); Russ Powell (Bartender). Publications Script: Glasmon, Kubec, John Bright, and Harvey Thew, The Public Enemy, edited by Henry Cohen, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981. Books: Shulman, Irving, Harlow: An Intimate Biography, New York, 1964. Conway, Michael, and Mark Ricci, The Films of Jean Harlow, New York, 1965. Gussow, Mel, Don’t Say Yes Until I’m Finished Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck, New York, 1971. McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA, London, 1972. Bergman, Andrew, Cagney, New York, 1973. Wellman, William, A Short Time for Insanity: An Autobiography, New York, 1974. Freedland, Michael, James Cagney, London, 1974. Higham, Charles, Warner Brothers, New York, 1975. Cagney, James, Cagney by Cagney, New York, 1976. Clark, Norman H., Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition, New York, 1976. Parish, James R., and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977. Meyer, William R., Warner Brothers Directors, New York, 1978. O’Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson, editors, American His- tory/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, New York, 1979. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres, New York, 1981. Clinch, Minty, Cagney: The Story of His Film Career, London, 1982. Jenkins, Steve, The Death of a Gangster, London, 1982. McGilligan, Patrick, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur, San Diego, 1982. Roddick, Nick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Bros in the 1930s, London, 1983. I PUGNI IN TASCA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 978 Thompson, Frank T., William A. Wellman, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1983, 1993. Schickel, Richard, James Cagney: A Celebration, London, 1985. Warren, Doug, James Cagney: The Authorised Biography, London, 1983; revised edition, 1986. Golden, Eve, Platinum Girl: The Life and Legends of Jean Harlow, New York, 1991. Stenn, David, Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, New York, 1993. McCabe, John, Cagney, New York, 1997. Articles: New York Times, 24 April 1931. Variety (New York), 29 April 1931. Kirstein, Lincoln, ‘‘Cagney and the American Hero,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), April 1932. Tynan, Kenneth, ‘‘Cagney and the Mob,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), May 1951. Miller, Don, ‘‘James Cagney,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1958. Whitehall, Richard, in Films and Filming (London), January 1964. Hanson, Curtis Lee, ‘‘A Memorable Visit with an Elder Statesman,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), July 1966. Warshow, Robert, ‘‘The Gangster as Tragic hero,’’ in The Immediate Experience, New York, 1970. Wellman, William, Jr., ‘‘William Wellman: Director Rebel,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), March-April 1970. Campbell, Russell, ‘‘Warner Brothers in the Thirties,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), June 1971. Fox, Julian, ‘‘A Man’s World: An Analysis of the Films of William Wellman,’’ in Films and Filming (London), March-April 1973. Kj?rup, S., ‘‘3 klassiska Gangsterfilm og deres Baggrund,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), August 1973. Peary, Gerald, ‘‘More Than Meets the Eye,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), March 1976. Linnéll, S.,’’Public Enemy—Samh?allets fiende nr. 1,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), no. 4, 1977. Mank, G., ‘‘Jean Harlow,’’ in Films in Review (New York), Decem- ber 1978. Guérif, F., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), April 1979. Prouty, Howard H., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Marling, W., ‘‘On the Relation Between American Roman Noir and Film Noir,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1993. Tracey, G., ‘‘James Cagney as Immigrant Icon: Norm and Periphery in Public Enemy (1931), The Mayor of Hell (1933) and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938),’’ in Michigan Academician, vol. 25, no. 3, 1993. Desilets, E. Michael, ‘‘Heartless Tom: Scripting Irish Myth,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 1997. *** Although The Public Enemy is now most remembered for the famous scene in which James Cagney smashes half a grapefruit into the face of actress Mae Clark—an act that more than one critic has termed the most vicious in all of motion picture history—the film is, in fact, one of the first of the gangster genre to examine the sociological roots of crime in a serious way. Because of some unforgettable images and a charismatic performance by Cagney in the role that made him famous, the film achieved the rare distinction of being both a major box office success and a public-spirited statement. The film’s overall treatment of violence is implied rather than graphic. Most of the violence occurs off camera, but through an innovative use of sound—for example, in the chilling scene in which Cagney murders the horse that killed his friend—the effects of the savagery are actually heightened. Similarly, the scenes in which Cagney’s gift-wrapped corpse is delivered to his brother or the bizarre scene in the rain after he is wounded (which prefigures the famous Gene Kelly ‘‘Singin’ in the Rain’’ number from that 1952 film) stunned audiences and justified the film’s social statement. When Cagney, riddled with bullets, falls face down in a rain gutter, his blood entering the torrent, and mutters ‘‘I ain’t so tough,’’ that is a restate- ment of the film’s prologue that it is within the public’s power to stamp out criminals. Between the picture’s framing prologue and epilogue, director William Wellman created powerful sequences that still retain much of their impact. Through the introduction of his characters as children and an elaborate opening pan that delineates their environment, Wellman establishes a relationship between sordid surroundings and the natural inclinations of children, that they sometimes interact to begin the evolution of the criminal. Yet much of the commentary surrounding these scenes seems simplistic to modern viewers. That the film retains much of its impact today is due largely to the performances, particularly those of Jean Harlow as Cagney’s seduc- tive mistress and Cagney himself as the gangster Tom Powers. Although the fortuitous pairing of the star with a role ideally suited to his talents was the result of one of Wellman’s ‘‘gut’’ instincts, Cagney’s magnetic performance made the film a smash hit and achieved some political repercussions as well: the picture uninten- tionally glamorized the criminal and indirectly hastened Hollywood’s implementation of a self-imposed Production Code to prevent such undesirable social figures from being depicted in future in a sympa- thetic way. Although The Public Enemy may seem tame in compari- son with some of the post-Code films of the last two decades, enough of its power survives to sustain it both as a film and as a creditable social document. —Steve Hanson I PUGNI IN TASCA (Fists in the Pocket) Italy, 1965 Director: Marco Bellocchio Production: Doria Cinematografica; black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 105 minutes. Filmed in 9 weeks. Cost 50,000,000 lire. Released 1965. Production director: Ugo Novello; screenplay: Marco Bellocchio; assistant director: Giuseppe Lanci; photography: Alberto Marrama; PULP FICTIONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 979 editor: Aurelio Mangiarotti (pseudonym of Silvano Agosti); produc- tion designer: Gisella Longo; music: Ennio Morricone; artistic collaboration for dubbing and montage: Elda Tattoli. Cast: Lou Castel (Alessandro); Paola Pitagora (Giulia); Marino Masé (Augusto); Liliana Gerace (Mother); Pier Luigi Troglio (Leone); Jennie MacNeil (Lucia); Maura Martini (Child); Giani Schicchi (Tonino); Alfredo Filippazzi (Doctor); Gianfranco Cella and Celestina Bellocchio (Youths at the party); Stefania Troglio (Waitress); Irene Agnelli (Bruna). Awards: Locarno Film Festival, Vela d’argento; Venice Film Festi- val, Prize Outside of Competition, 1965. Publications Script: Bellocchio, Marco, I pugni in tasca (scenario), Milan, 1967. Books: Wlaschin, Ken, Italian Cinema since the War, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema, New York, 1972. Bernardi, Sandro, Bellocchio: Marco Bellocchio, Firenze, 1978. Malanga, Paola, Marco Bellocchio, Milan, 1998. Articles: Interview with Marco Bellocchio, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1965. Bontemps, Jacques, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1965. Jacob, Gilles, ‘‘Le Cercle de famille,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), June 1966. Bellocchio, Marco, ‘‘The Sterility of Provocation,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma in English (New York), January 1967. Delmas, Jean, ‘‘Les Poings dans les poches à travers les controverses,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), nos. 27–28, 1968. Lisor, A., in Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Zalaffi, N., ‘‘Entretien avec Marco Bellocchio,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), April 1973. Salvi, Demetrio, in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 33, no. 327, Septem- ber 1993. Masoni, T., ‘‘I trent’anni de I pugni in tasca,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 35, no. 335, June 1995. Lasagna, R., ‘‘Gli spettri l’epilessia a trent’anni da I pugni in tasca,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), vol. 44, no. 356/357, July/October 1995. *** After attending the Centro Sperimentale film school in Rome and then studying (on a grant) at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, Marco Bellocchio returned to his native town of Piacenza and set out to make a feature film. Because he couldn’t find a producer willing to underwrite the project, he borrowed money from one of his brothers and created a set in his family’s country house near Bóbbio. He filmed for nine weeks on a shoestring budget of 50,000,000 lire (28,000 pounds sterling). The result, Fists in the Pocket, hit Italy like a bomb. The film was unanimously acclaimed for the skill of its direction and expressive camera work, and it received numerous awards at film festivals, thus ensuring international distribution. French critics com- pared the film favorably to Zero for Conduct by Jean Vigo and L’age d’or by Luis Bu?uel, and Italian critics announced that they had not seen such a powerful debut since Visconti’s Ossessione. For the next ten years Bellocchio was regarded as one of Italy’s leading political filmmakers whose films also performed respectably at the box office. Fists in the Pocket is about a family living in the provinces, and is a bitter denunciation of bourgeois values from an angry young member of the bourgeoisie. Situations are shown at their most extreme: two of the five family members are epileptics, the youngest son is an idiot, and the mother is blind—all abnormal states working as commentaries upon what Bellocchio sees as normal conditions in family life. The sister’s epilepsy, for example, is a metaphor for the agonizing emotions of jealousy, incestual desire, and the fear that she always feels. The mother is blind because, as Bellocchio explained, ‘‘When a son becomes 18, his mother no longer sees him, no longer understands him, and is no longer of use to him.’’ The only family member who has normal contacts with the outside world is Augusto, but he is also clearly representative of the hypocrisy and emptiness of so-called ‘‘normalcy.’’ Alessandro, the main character, acts as catalyst in the film. He respects Augusto so much that, in order to relieve Augusto of the burden of being the patriarchal protector of the sick family, he decides to kill everyone else in the house. The tiny push he gives the mother in the cemetery (which sends her literally to her grave) is an allegorical act testifying that within the bourgeois system a minor action is sufficient enough to make the whole structure fall. Alessandro kills his younger brother in the bathtub, which, with its warm water and Freudian connotations, represents the womb from which Alessandro never wanted Leone to emerge. Alessandro also attempts to kill his sister, with whom he has had an incestuous relationship. Meanwhile Augusto, acting out his role as true patriarch, allows his underling brother to commit crimes the result of which will be advantageous to himself. The characters are depraved, fanatical, and morbid. As well, the film’s rough style makes no concession to the traditional rapport among artist/character/spectator; here the spectator must remain active and question the director’s objectivity in presenting gruesome events and bizarre psychological states. Bellocchio said in an inter- view (in Positif) that, although his work had exorcised demons from his own past, he wished to present that past in the most objective and critical way so that it might then be of use to others. —Elaine Mancini PULP FICTION USA, 1994 Director: Quentin Tarantino Production: Jersey Films, in association with Miramax; color, 35mm; running time: 149. PULP FICTION FILMS, 4 th EDITION 980 Pulp Fiction Producer: Lawrence Bender; executive producers: Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, and Stacey Sher; screenplay: Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, based on stories by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary; photography: Andrzej Sekula; editor: Sally Menke; pro- duction designer: David Wasco; art designer: Charles Collum; casting: Ronnie Yeskell and Gary M. Zuckerbrod; sound: Ken King; special effects: Larry Fioritto; set designer: Sandy Reynolds-Wasco; costume designer: Betsy Heimann. Cast: John Travolta (Vincent Vega); Samuel L. Jackson (Jules Winnfield); Uma Thurman (Mia Wallace); Harvey Kietel (The Wolf); Tim Roth (Pumpkin); Amanda Plummer (Honey Bunny); Maria de Medeiros (Fabienne); Ving Rhames (Marsellus Wallace); Eric Stoltz (Lance); Rosanna Arquette (Jody); Christopher Walken (Captain Koons); Bruce Willis (Butch Coolidge); Quentin Tarantino (Jimmie); Steve Buscemi (Surly Buddy Holly Waiter); Frank Whaley (Brett); Duane Whitaker (Maynard); Peter Greene (Zed). Awards: Palme d’Or, Cannes International Film Festival, 1994; New York Film Critics Circle Award, for direction and screenwriting, 1994; Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, 1995. Publications Script: Tarantino, Quentin, Pulp Fiction: A Quentin Tarantino Screenplay, New York, 1994. Books: Dawson, Jeff, Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool, New York, 1995. Barnes, Alan, and Marcus Hearn, Tarantino: A to Z, North Pomfret, 1996; revised edition, 1999. Woods, Paul A., King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino, London, 1996, 1998. Peary, Gerald, Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Jackson, 1998. Woods, Paul A., Quentin Tarantino: The Film Creek Files, Aus- tin, 1999. PULP FICTIONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 981 Articles: Corliss, Richard, Time (New York), 10 October 1994. Lane, Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 10 October 1994. Hirschberg, Lynn, ‘‘Tarantino Bravo,’’ in Vanity Fair (New York), July 1994. Gordinier, Jeff, ‘‘The Man in the Plastic Bubble,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (New York), 21 October 1994. Wild, David, ‘‘Quentin Tarantino,’’ in Rolling Stone (New York), 3 November 1994. Smith, Gavin, ‘‘When You Know You’re in Good Hands,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1994. Siskel, Gene, ‘‘Brilliant Dialogue Makes Violent Pulp Fiction Spe- cial,’’ in Chicago Tribune, 14 October 1994. Hinson, Hal, ‘‘Killer Instinct: This Time, Director Tarantino’s Thugs Slay You With Humor,’’ in the Washington Post, 9 October 1994. de Vries, Hilary, ‘‘Tarantino: The In-Your-Face Auteur,’’ in Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1994. Pawelczak, Andy, in Films in Review (New York), vol. 46, no. 1–2, January-February 1995. Dowell, Pat, and John Fried, ‘‘Pulp Friction: Two Shots at Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 21, no. 3, 1995. Petersen, George, ‘‘Building Character Through Violence: A One- Two Punch,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 3, no. 1, Summer 1996. Chumo, Peter N., II, ‘‘The Next Best Thing to a Time Machine: Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 15, no. 3, Summer 1996. Lucas, Tim, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), vol. 32, 1996. Stenger, J., ‘‘Power, Penetration, and Punishment: Masculinity and Male Control in Pulp Fiction,’’ in Michigan Academician, vol. 28, no. 3, 1996. Leitch, Thomas M., and David Lavery, ‘‘Know-Nothing Entertaintment: What to Say to Your Friends on the Right, and Why It Won’t Do Any Good/‘No Box of Chocolates’: The Adaptation of Forrest Gump,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 25, no. 1, January 1997. Kimball, A. Samuel, ‘‘’Bad-Ass Dudes’ in Pulp Fiction: Homophobia and the Counterphobic Idealization of Women,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Reading), vol. 16, no. 2, Septem- ber 1997. Zigelstein, J., ‘‘Staying Alive in the 90s: Travolta as Star and the Performance of Masculinity,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 44, 1997. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack, ‘‘Shepherding the Weak: The Ethics of Redemption in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 1, January 1998. Wolcott, James, ‘‘Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Big Stain,’’ in Vanity Fair (New York), no. 452, April 1998. *** Newcomer Quentin Tarantino injected some Scorsesian adrenalin and an overdose of Scorsesian banter among his low-life characters into his feature film debut Reservoir Dogs (1992), a contemporary heist film that owed its plot to Raoul Walsh’s classic gangster movie White Heat and its oddball narrative structure to Stanley Kubrick’s heist film The Killing. Critically acclaimed—and controversial— because of its gritty gutter language, back-and-forth in time method of storytelling, and mixture of humor and extremely graphic violence, Reservoir Dogs brought Tarantino to the attention of Hollywood. But his follow-up, Pulp Fiction, made him the inspiration of film school graduates everywhere—even though Tarantino himself never went to film school. The director studied his craft by clerking at a video store where he watched everything on the shelves, from the classics to the wild and bloody Hong Kong action movies of Jackie Chan and John Woo, all the while writing scripts in his spare time. Like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction deals with a disparate group of low-life gangland characters, each of whom shares one thing in common: a gift for gab and gunplay. The milieu, storylines, and characters of the drama are straight out of the pages of those tawdry dime magazines from which the film derives its wonderfully apt title. It tells several stories concurrently, some of which intersect as the film unfolds. Characters are introduced, dropped, or killed off and later returned as the film’s narrative structure jumps back and forth in the non-linear way of Reservoir Dogs and its Kubrick model. The film starts out with a hold-up in a restaurant by a pair of hot- headed neophytes (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer), then picks up the story of two mob hitmen played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Travolta’s duties also include chaperoning his boss’s drug addict girlfriend (Uma Thurman) around town and keeping her out of trouble while the boss is away. Yet another story involves a prizefighter (Bruce Willis) who takes it on the lam to get out from under the crooked clutches of the mob. This story, like so many of the bits and pieces of Pulp Fiction, owes its inspiration to Tarantino’s years of movie watching; it’s his take on the classic Robert Siodmack film noir The Killers. References to everything from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly abound throughout Pulp Fiction, making it a film buff’s movie. The film ends where it began, in the restaurant, where Jackson and Travolta stop for a bite to eat after their labors; Jackson not only foils the hold-up, but sets the robbers on a straight path, turning the film into a shaggy morality tale. Like his characters, Tarantino has a gift for gunplay. Pulp Fic- tion’s graphically violent setpieces are not for the faint of heart; the blood flows as freely and as spectacularly as it does in the Hong Kong action movies Tarantino loves so much. But the scene where the desperate Travolta must jump-start Thurman’s heart with a hypo after she suffers a drug overdose is arguably the film’s grisliest and most potent—and there’s not a gun in sight. Tarantino also shares his characters’ gift of gab. Dialogue is not typically a high point of action films. But it is in a Tarantino action movie. In fact, dialogue is Tarantino’s most distinctive trademark— as well as his most individual. He thinks nothing of having his characters consume minutes of screen time spouting pages and pages of dialogue, ranging from the innocuous, to the hilarious, to the eloquent and even poignant—and all of it revealing of their charac- ters. Travolta and Jackson’s constantly bantering hitmen do most of the film’s best and brightest talking. And their exchanges, wherein among other things Travolta comments on the French translation of ‘‘quarter pounder with cheese’’ while Jackson waxes philosophically on the possibilities of redemption, are priceless. The two actors earned Oscar nominations for their performances—Travolta as Best Actor, Jackson as Best Supporting Actor, although their parts in the film are of equal weight. Neither won. The film, however won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, transforming Tarantino into Hollywood’s hottest wunderkind since Steven Spielberg. —John McCarty PUTYOVKA V ZHIZN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 982 Putyovka v zhizn PUTYOVKA V ZHIZN (The Road to Life) USSR, 1931 Director: Nikolai Ekk Production: Mezhrabpomfilm (USSR); black and white, 35mm; running time: about 100 minutes; length: 3330 meters. Released June 1931. Re-released May 1957, re-edited and re-dubbed by Nikolai Ekk and Yakov Stollyar (2617 meters). Screenplay: Nikolai Ekk, Alexander Stolper, and R. Yanushkevich; photography: Vasili Pronin; sound: E. Nesterov; art directors: I. Stepanov and A. Evmenko; music: Yakov Stollyar. Cast: Mikhail Zharov (Zhigan); Nikolai Batalov (Sergeev); Ivan Kyrlya (Mustafa); A. Antropova (Inspector); M. Dzhagofavov (Kolka); V. Vesnovski (His father); R. Yanukevich (Mother); Maria Gonka (Lolka); Alexander Nowikov (Saschka). Publications Script: Ekk, Nikolai, Alexander Stolper, and R. Yanushkevich, Putyovka v Zhizn, in Kniga Stzenariev, edited by K. Yukov, Moscow, 1935. Books: Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Dickinson, Thorold, and Catherine De La Roche, Soviet Cinema, revised edition, New York, 1972. Rimberg, John, The Motion Picture in the Soviet Union 1918–1952: A Sociological Analysis, New York, 1973. Articles: ‘‘Film in Moscow,’’ in Spectator (London), 31 October 1931. Kraszna-Krausz, A., ‘‘The First Russian Sound Films,’’ in Close-Up (London), December 1931. PUTYOVKA V ZHIZNFILMS, 4 th EDITION 983 Holba, H., ‘‘Der Weg ins Leben: hin und zurück über Gubenkos Film Mit gebrochenen Schwingen,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), no. 9, 1979. Stoianov-Bigor, G., in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), August 1979. Isimetov, Mikhail, ‘‘Mustafa’s Smile,’’ in Soviet Film (Moscow), no. 9, 1981. *** One of the first Soviet sound films—with an imaginative sound track far ahead of its time—Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life was a smash hit both in Russia and in the West, where its impact generated some dozen spin-offs on its theme of ‘‘difficult’’ children. A Soviet critic, legitimising its official function, wrote that ‘‘the film’s success depended on the social problems involved, problems of responsibility towards a new generation.’’ But he added, more acutely, that the film broke new ground because ‘‘it did not merely manipulate the life stories of the people involved in order to illustrate social problems but let the problems grow out of these life stories and their dramatic development.’’ The film’s theme is the reformation—or rescue—of one of the bands of besprizorni (homeless children) who roamed, and terrorised, city streets in the difficult post-civil war years. The gang loyalties are torn between Zhigan, a sort of Fagin character played by Mikhail Zharov, who urges them to carry on thieving, and Sergeev, the head of a ‘‘work-commune,’’ played by Nikolai Batalov, who tries to lead them into the paths of righteousness. The children themselves were not from a stage school but were inmates, or pupils, of work- communes (reform schools or rehabilitation centres in which students were expected to work on real projects—in the film, the building of a railroad). Despite their superb performances, not one of these kids later became a professional actor, not even Ivan Kyrlya, who plays the gang leader Mustafa, whose Asian features, far from inscrutable, vividly expressed every emotion. Kyrlya grew up to become a famous poet, writing in Mari, his native language. Highly professional, the actors who played hero and villain gave performances that seem equally natural and true to life. Zharov was no Dickensian villain, but used his powerful physical presence to portray a man governed by instinct, a man able to attract as well as intimidate his teenage thieves. His moments of melancholy rapture, whenever he picks up his guitar, made the songs he sings top of the contemporary pops. Although accused therefore of romanticising thieves and their slang, Ekk had no Brechtian intention of updating the Beggar’s Opera by introducing underworld folksongs as ‘‘pro- duction numbers’’: as he intended, they come across as spontaneous expressions of the character and are an integral part of the film. If Zharov portrayed instinct, Batalov, the hero, portrayed thought. As, with imaginative accuracy, his dialogue is limited to the repetition of a few dozen pithy phrases, he has to convey much of his thinking with his eyes and facial expressions. But Batalov arrived at this impressive performance only after spending much time at a work- commune, getting to know its Head and (in Batalov’s words) ‘‘learn- ing his method of handling the students, which had an enormous influence on my interpretation of the role.’’ Ekk steers his simple down-to-earth story of good and evil daringly close to, but (despite the tear-jerking presence of his band of boys) always clear of sentimentality, always remembering that the boys are wicked as well as innocent. He is never afraid of shock sequences—mutiny in the commune, smashing up the thieves’ den, Mustafa’s death on the railroad—for they seem to arise logically from the realistic documentary course of the story and fit smoothly into the somewhat spiky but deeply expressive rhythm of his editing tech- nique. A talented but sensitive and retiring man, Ekk was never again to equal the success of Road to Life, which had so great an influence on filmmakers both at home and abroad. —Robert Dunbar 985 Q QIU JU DA GUANSI (The Story of Qiu Ju) Hong Kong-China, 1992 Director: Zhang Yimou Production: Sil-Metropole Organisation, Youth Film Studio of Beijing Film Academy; colour, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Producer: Feng Yiting; screenplay: Liu Heng, based on the story Wanjia Susong by Chen Yuanbin; photography: Chi Xiaoning, Yu Xiaoqun; editor: Du Yuan; assistant directors: Hu Xiaofeng, Zhang Zhenyan, Tian Weixi; art director: Cao Jiuping; music: Zhao Jiping; sound recording: Li Lanhua; costume design: Tong Huamiao. Cast: Gong Li (Qiu Ju); Liu Peiqi (Qinglai); Yang Liuchun (Meizi); Lei Laosheng (Wang); Ge Zhijun (Officer Li). Awards: Golden Lion, best actress, Venice International Film Festi- val, 1992; selection, New York Film Festival, 1992. Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 14 September 1992. Maslin, Janet, The New York Times, 2 October 1992. Positif (Paris), November 1992. Ciment, M., and others, Positif (Paris), December 1992. Buck, Joan Juliet, Vogue (New York), April 1993. Travers, Peter, Rolling Stone (New York), 15 April 1993. Corliss, Richard, Time (New York), 26 April 1993. Denby, David, New York, 26 April 1993. Lane, Anthony, The New Yorker, 26 April 1993. Cheng, Scarlet, The World & I (Washington, D.C.), May 1993. Rayns, T., Sight and Sound (London), May 1993. Klawans, Stuart, The Nation, 3 May 1993. Kauffman, Stanley, The New Republic, 17 May 1993. Spence, Jonathan, The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1993. Sklar, R., Cineaste (New York), July 1993. Cloutier, M., Séquences (Montreal), July-August 1993. Kissin, E.H., Films in Review (New York), July-August 1993. Sterritt, David, The Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 13 Janu- ary 1994. Rayns, T., ‘‘Propositions and Questions,’’ in Cinemaya (New Delhi), no. 30, Autumn 1995. Feinstein, Howard, ‘‘Losing a Muse and Moving On,’’ in The New York Times, 6 February 2000. *** After making his fame on period pieces in which the willful young woman (played inevitably by Gong Li) confronts the formidable power of feudalism, Chinese director Zhang Yimou turned to a more contemporary story line and humble cast of characters in his fifth feature, The Story of Qiu Ju. This time leading lady Gong Li plays Qiu Ju, the simple but most stubborn country wife who decides to get justice for her husband—and ultimately, for herself. At the start of the movie, her husband, Qinglai, has been beaten up by the ill-tempered village head, Wang Shantang, during an alterca- tion, and Qiu Ju and relatives rush Qinglai in a litter to the nearest town doctor. When they arrive, Qiu Ju proves herself a pragmatic skeptic, wondering if the fellow is a real doctor (‘‘He looks more like a veterinarian . . . ’’) and making sure he washes his hand before treatment. Our heroine is especially upset because Wang has kicked her mate in the groin. As she says, ‘‘But how could he kick you there where it affects future generations?’’ At first Qiu Ju takes up the matter with the local policeman, who mediates a settlement which includes a cash payment. However, when the very pregnant woman goes to collect her due, Wang arrogantly scatters the money to the ground saying, ‘‘And each time you pick up a bill, you’ll bow to me.’’ Naturally, proud Qiu Ju walks off, with nary a cent—and seeks other remedy. Soon she is going off to towns, accompanied by her sister, and it is comic watching this very determined and very pregnant woman waddling in and out of wagons and buses and in and out of various offices seeking redress. Meanwhile, the trips are financed by sales of great bunches of the red chilies the family grows. As Qiu Ju climbs higher and higher up the levels of justice, she moves into more modern and more foreign environments. In the big city, she and her sister stare in wonder about them as cars and motorcycles whiz by, when they find street upon street of shops and food stalls. Qiu Ju indulges herself by buying a ‘‘high fashion’’ jacket that is garish and serves only to emphasize her bulge. Finally, she has to hire a lawyer to bring suit against Wang. In the end, in a kind of O. Henry twist, justice comes in a cold, swift way Qiu Ju did not intend. Gong Li here is unexpectedly unglamorous, with freckles on her ruddy cheeks, and waddling about in a heavily padded jacket. Her low-keyed and completely convincing performance won her rave reviews, as well as a best actress prize in at the Venice International Film Festival. The Story of Qiu Ju is an intriguing experiment in filmmaking. Zhang actually enlisted the acting talents of a whole village, caught ordinary people unaware in their daily activities, sometimes shooting situations with a hidden camera using Super 16 film. There were only LE QUAI DES BRUMES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 986 four professional actors used—for the characters of Qiu Ju, her husband, the village head, and the local policeman. As such, it has a languid feel, with far less tension than his usually tightly constructed films. Perhaps because of the deliberately down-played tone of Qiu Ju, the cinematography is pedestrian. It is competent but certainly not outstanding—something which we have come to expect in the films of one who was first trained as a cinematographer. Some Western critics were enraptured by the film, sensing the truth of a kind of Neo-Social Realism in it. And indeed, here was a feature that showed the craggy humdrum aspect of Chinese life few Westerners had seen up close. Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote that the film ‘‘reaffirms Zhang Yimou’s stature as storyteller and sociologist extraordinaire, and as a visual artist of exceptional delicacy and insight.’’ However, others, who have been to China, know that village life and the government bureaucracy are much more gritty and harsh than Zhang has let on. Indeed, some have accused the director of deliber- ately trying to please the cadres with his portrayal of decent and upstanding functionaries, especially when in reality indifference and corruption are rampant. Still, as China’s best-known director, perhaps Zhang is held to account for more than his share of responsibilities. After all, his ambitions in this film were modest. Zhang has said, ‘‘I strived for realism because I felt this was the best way to convey the true spirit and simplicity of the people of China’s countryside, who for me are the heart and soul of China itself.’’ In 1992 the film won the top prize of the Golden Lion and the best actress award for Gong Li at the Venice International Film Festival. It was also a selection of the New York Film Festival. —Scarlet Cheng LE QUAI DES BRUMES France, 1938 Director: Marcel Carné Production: Ciné-Alliance (some sources state Sigma-Frogerais); black and white, 35mm; running time: 91 minutes. Released 18 May 1938, Paris. Filmed January-February 1938 in the Pathé-Nathan studios, exteriors shot in Le Havre. Producer: Grégor Rabinovitch (some sources list Simon Schiffrin); screenplay: Jacques Prévert, from the novel by Pierre MacOrlan; photography: Eugene Schufftan; editor: René Le Hénaff; sound: Antoine Archaimbaud; production designers: Alexandre Trauner with Paul Bertrand; music: Maurice Jaubert. Cast: Jean Gabin (Jean); Michèle Morgan (Nelly); Michel Simon (Zabel); Aimos (Quart-Vittel); René Génin (Doctor); Pierre Brasseur (Lucien); Edouard Delmont (Panama); Robert Le Vigan (Michel Krauss); Marcel Perès (Chauffeur); Kiki (the dog). Awards: Prix Louis Delluc, 1938; Académie du Film, Prix Méliès, 1938; Grand Prix National du Cinéma Fran?ais, 1939. Le Quai des Brumes Publications Script: Prévert, Jacques, Le Quai des brumes, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1979. Books: Beranger, Jean-Louis, Marcel Carné, Paris, 1945. Sadoul, Georges, French Film, Paris, 1947. Landry, Bernard, Marcel Carné: Sa vie, ses films, Paris, 1952. Quéval, Jean, Marcel Carné, Paris, 1952. Whitaker, Rodney W., The Content Analysis of Film: An Exhaustive Study of ‘‘Le Quai des brumes,” Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966. Armes, Roy, French Film since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1970. Gauteur, Claude, and Andre Bernard, Gabin; ou, Les Avatars d’un mythe, Paris, 1976. Missiaen, Jean-Claude, and Jacques Siclier, Jean Gabin, Paris, 1977. Ellis, Jack C., A History of Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1979. Milhaud, Sylvie, Jean Gabin, Paris, 1981. Pérez, Michel, Les Films de Carné, Paris, 1986. Brunelin, André, Jean Gabin, Paris, 1987. Turk, Edward Baron, Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema, Cambridge, 1989, 1992. Carné, Marcel, Ma vie à belles dents: mémoires, Paris, 1996. LE QUAI DES BRUMESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 987 Articles: Variety (New York), 15 June 1938. Cinematographie Fran?aise (Paris), 12 August 1938. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 62, 1939. Spectator (London), 27 January 1939. Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1939. New York Times, 30 October 1939. Manvell, Roger, ‘‘Marcel Carné,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1946. Lodge, J. F., ‘‘The Cinema of Marcel Carné,’’ in Sequence (London), December 1946. Lambert, Gavin, ‘‘Marcel Carné,’’ in Sequence (London), Spring 1948. Duvillars, Pierre, ‘‘Jean Gabin’s Instinctual Man,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1951. Daquin, Louis, ‘‘Les 20 Ans de cinéma de Marcel Carné,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 1 March 1956. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Les Films de Marcel Carné, expression de notre époque,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 1 March 1956. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Carné Bubble,’’ in Film (London), Novem- ber-December 1959. Nolan, Jack E., ‘‘Jean Gabin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1963. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Jean Gabin,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Febru- ary 1964. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. ‘‘Carné Issue’’ of Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), Win- ter 1972. Carné, Marcel, ‘‘Comment est né Le Quai des brumes,’’ in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1979. Magill’s Survey of Cinema: Foreign Language Films, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1985. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 466, December 1990. Leahy, James, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 58, no. 687, April 1991. Faulkner, C., ‘‘Affective Identities: French National Cinema and the 1930s,’’ in Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Ottawa), vol. 3, no. 2, 1994. Bates, Robin, ‘‘Audiences on the Verge of a Fascist Breakdown: Male Anxieties and Late 1930s French Film,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 3, Spring 1997. *** Marcel Carné’s Le quai des brumes and Le jour se lève are examples of ‘‘poetic realism,’’ a filmic style and narration often found in the French cinema of the 1930s. The term is, however, an unreliable critical rubric since the generalities and imprecisions associated with ‘‘poetry’’ and ‘‘realism’’ mask the specific elements of the texts it presumes to characterize. In the case of Carné, many of those specific elements can be traced to his collaborators. Assistant to Jacques Feyder, Carné was clearly influenced by the world-weariness of the older director’s Le grand jeu and by the fascination of marginal lives in Pension Mimosas. Carné’s first film, Jenny, stars Feyder’s wife, Fran?oise Rosay. Other consis- tencies in Carné’s films are provided by Jacques Prévert, who was responsible for all of Carné’s scripts until the 1950s, as well as by the sets of Alexandre Trauner and the music of Maurice Jaubert. Jean Gabin, the hero of Le quai des brumes and Le jour se lève, is the actor whose persona most insistently dominates Carné’s pre-war films. One of Gabin’s mid-1930s’ successes was in Duvivier’s La bandéra, based upon a novel of Pierre MacOrlan, who was also the author of Le quai des brumes. The most apparent changes wrought by Carné and Prévert in MacOrlan’s novel were the transpositions of time (from the turn-of-the-century to sometime vaguely contempo- rary) and place (from Paris to Le Havre). Carné, who would prove himself so expert in the rendition of period detail in Les enfants du paradis, opts here for a non-specific temporality, for an epoch that is both removed from and familiar to viewers. The port city is exploited for the degree to which it suggests the edge of the world, a jumping- off place (enacted in the suicide of one of the film’s characters), the place for final decisions, the place for taking the last chance. What- ever might have been specific to the real city of Le Havre (location shooting was begun there on January 2, 1938) is sacrificed to the evocation of port per se, the port of all ports, and to the allegorization of place appropriate to the film’s schematics of plot and character. The ‘‘realism’’ of Carné’s ‘‘poetry’’ is shrouded in the dark shadows and fog that enhance the elusiveness of the fiction. Plot is the skeleton required to sustain the trajectory of Jean, the hero, the deserter, from arrival (he materializes out of nearly pitch darkness on a deserted road) to departure (his death) through his encounter with the other desperate men and his love for a mysterious woman. The script provides little in terms of background or motivation beyond the basic tensions of its good/evil, outsider/bourgeois society oppositions. If lines such as ‘‘C’est difficile de vivre’’ (living is difficult) and ‘‘Oui on est seul’’ (Yes, you’re alone) suggest a proto-existentialism, the incorporeal nature of the film’s texture is distant from the tangibilities of existential art. But Le quai des brumes does generate a specific density through its enactments and stagings. Gabin may appear from nowhere, but he bears with him the weight of a highly identifiable presence, that of the most bankable star in French cinema. (In fact, it was Gabin’s faith in the project that kept it from foundering when, just a few days before shooting was about to begin, the head of the production company financing the film, Gregor Rabinovitch, read the script and tried to dissuade the star from doing such a downbeat subject. Gabin per- sisted. He undoubtedly saw in the role of Jean a rich variation of the type of doomed hero that had brought him such success in Duvivier’s Pépé-le-Moko, Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour, and Renoir’s Les bas- fonds.) The very young Michèle Morgan matched enigma to Gabin’s mixture of strength and tenderness. Their first meeting takes place in a café that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. Shots ring out. A deserter and a woman wearing a beret and a transparent raincoat exchange names and fall in love. This configuration defines French film noir, its style and milieu, its challenge to bourgeois aesthetics and ethics. Here, far from the light of the natural world (in this darkness a patch of light is a privilege), far from families and social contexts, even far from conventional plots with their careful, ‘‘logical’’ identi- fications of situation and character, there flourish these emblems of gallantry and beauty. Gabin and Morgan retain something of their emblematic status for the duration of a fiction that so sharply designates good and evil. The lovers are tormented by the petty criminal (Pierre Brasseur, who figures so importantly in Les enfants du paradis) and by the girl’s guardian, the prototypical dirty old man. Played by Michel Simon (if Gabin is the most popular leading man in French cinema, Simon is its most popular character actor), Zebel, the character no one can bear to LES QUATRES CENTS COUPS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 988 be with or see, locates the film’s moral conflict in a contrast of surfaces, of beauty and ugliness. It is the very notion of surface, however, that distinguishes the film, that makes Le quai des brumes an examination of the concept of image. Near the beginning, Jean meets a painter who soon after commits suicide. He jumps off this ‘‘edge of the world’’ and provides Jean, the deserter, with the clothes and identity that take him through the rest of the film. The painter is tormented by the acuity of his own vision. He sees behind things, through things. He sees to the core of images, to their decay. He would paint Jean with his hands in his pockets, at night, in fog. This is a project for a portrait filled with signs of concealment. And in the space between the hidden and the revealed lies the truth. The painter is a surrogate for Carné and Prévert. What he says clearly defines the relationship between image (both visual and verbal) and meaning in the film. It is from this expression of style that character, narrative, and film are generated. —Charles Affron LES QUATRES CENTS COUPS (The 400 Blows) France, 1959 Director: Fran?ois Truffaut Production: Les Films du Carrosse and SEDIF; black and white, 35mm, Dyaliscope; running time: 94 minutes. Released 3 June 1959, dedicated to André Bazin. Producer: Georges Charlot; screenplay: Marcel Moussy, from an original story by Fran?ois Truffaut; photography: Henri Deca?; editor: Marie-Joseph Yoyotte; sound: Jean-Claude Marchetti; art director: Bernard Evein; music: Jean Constantin. Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine Doinel); Claire Maurier (Gilberte Doinel); Albert Rémy (Julien Doinel); Guy Decomble (‘‘Little Quiz’’); Georges Flamant (Monsieur Bicey, René’s Father); Patrick Auffray (René); Daniel Couturier, Fran?ois Nocher, Richard Kanayan, Michel Girard, Henri Moati, Bernard Abbou, Michael Lesignor, Jean-Fran?ois Bergouignan (the children); special guest appearances by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Claude Brialy. Awards: New York Film Critics’ Award, Best Foreign Film, 1959; Best Director and Catholic Film Office Awards, Cannes Film Festi- val, 1959. Publications Scripts: Truffaut, Fran?ois, and Marcel Moussy, Les quatre cents coups, Paris, 1959; as The 400 Blows, edited by David Denby, New York, 1969; in The Adventures of Antoine Doinel: 4 Screenplays by Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1971. Books: Taylor, John Russell, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, New York, 1964. Graham, Peter, The New Wave, New York, 1968. Petrie, Graham, The Cinema of Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1970. Crisp, C. G., Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1972. Fanne, Dominique, L’Univers de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1972. Allen, Don, Finally Truffaut, London, 1973; revised edition, 1985. Monaco, James, The New Wave, New York, 1976. Collet, Jean, Le Cinéma de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1977. Insdorf, Annette, Fran?ois Truffaut, Boston, 1978. Thiher, Allen, The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, Columbia, Missouri, 1979. Walz, Eugene P., Fran?ois Truffaut: A Guide to Reference and Resources, Boston, 1982. Winkler, Willi, Die Filme von Fran?ois Truffaut, Munich, 1984. Bergala, Alain, and others, Le Roman de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1985. Collet, Jean, Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1985. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Truffaut par Truffaut, edited by Dominique Rabourdin, Paris, 1985. De Fornari, Oreste, I filme di Fran?ois Truffaut, Rome, 1986. Dalmais, Hervé, Truffaut, Paris, 1987. Gillian, Anne, Fran?ois Truffaut: le secret perdu, Paris, 1991. Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram, Fran?ois Truffaut, Manches- ter, 1998. Articles: Rivette, Jacques, ‘‘Du c?té de chez Antoine,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1959. Corbin, Louis, in Films in Review (New York), November 1959. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 25 November 1959. Hartung, P. T., ‘‘Screen,’’ in Commonweal (New York), 27 Novem- ber 1959. Croce, Arlene, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 3, 1960. Rhode, Eric, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1960. New Yorker, 20 February 1960. Rotha, Paul, in Films and Filming (London), April 1960. Franci, R. M., and Marshall Lewis, ‘‘A Conversation with Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, nos. 12, 13 and 14, 1961. Interview with L. Marcorelles, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1961–62. Franci, R. M., and Marshall Lewis, ‘‘Conversation with Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, no. 3, 1962. Shatnoff, Judith, ‘‘Fran?ois Truffaut—The Anarchist Imagination,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1963. Ronder, Paul, ‘‘Fran?ois Truffaut—An Interview,’’ in Film Quar- terly (Berkeley), Fall 1963. Klein, Michael, ‘‘The Literary Sophistication of Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965. Sawyer, Paul, in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1967–68. Jacob, Gilles, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1968. LES QUATRES CENTS COUPSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 989 Les Quatres Cents Coups Helman, A., ‘‘Czterysta batów,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), November 1973. ‘‘Dialogue on Film: Interview with Truffaut,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), May 1976. Poague, Leland, ‘‘On Time and Truffaut,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Summer 1976. Mast, Gerald, ‘‘From 400 Blows to Small Change,’’ in New Republic (New York), 2 April 1977. Thiher, Allen, ‘‘The Existential Play in Truffaut’s Early Films,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Summer 1977. Carre?o, J. M., in Casablanca (Madrid), February 1984. Turner, D., ‘‘Made in the USA: The American Child in Truffaut’s 400 Blows,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1984. Schmidt, N., ‘‘Cinéma et télévision,’’ CinémAction (Conde-sur- Noireau, France), no. 2, June 1992. Neupert, R., ‘‘The Musical Score as Closure Device in The 400 Blows,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 1, 1989. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘The 400 Blows / Jules et Jim,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati, Ohio), no. 19, September/October, 1993. Bjorkman, S., ‘‘En stillbild i en stillbild . . . still,’’ Chaplin (Stock- holm), vol. 36, 1994. Colville, G.M.M., ‘‘Pere perdus, peres retrouves dans l’oeuvre de Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ French Review, vol. 68, no. 2, 1994. S?derbergh Widding, Astrid, ‘‘En stillbild ur Fran?ois Truffaut’s De 400 slagen,’’ Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 38, no. 1, 1996. Raskin, R. ‘‘A Note on Closure in Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups,’’ P.O.V. (Denmark), no. 2, December 1996. Mandolini, C., ‘‘Les quatre cents coups,’’ Sequences (Quebec), no. 189–190, March/June 1997. *** The film career of Fran?ois Truffaut is marked by paradox. As the ‘‘enfant terrible’’ of French film criticism he was barred from attending the Cannes Film Festival of 1958. But in 1959 his first feature-length film, Les quatre cents coups, earned him honors as Best Director. Similarly, Truffaut’s role as champion of the ‘‘politique des auteurs’’ also involved a species of paradox, in his attacking the French ‘‘tradition of quality’’ while praising American film noir in traditional aesthetic terms, in his praising of individual self-expres- sion while creating a ‘‘counter tradition’’ of filmic reference points from sources as diverse as neorealism and Hollywood. Especially LES QUATRES CENTS COUPS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 990 important in Truffaut—given the tensions implicit in his critical stance—is the fact of language, at once a social institution and a means of personal expression. Repeatedly it is through language that Truffaut’s central characters—most of them loners of one sort or another—attempt to reconcile themselves to society, as Truffaut himself, perhaps, has used language, especially the language of cinema, to establish his position as the most consistently successful of the Cahiers du cinéma group of New Wave directors that included not only Truffaut but also Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. To see Les quatre cents coups against the background of the European cinema is to become especially conscious of Truffaut’s indebtedness to Vigo, Rossellini, and Renoir. Vigo’s short documen- tary A propos de Nice is a study of a city, with particular emphasis on the contrast between rich and poor. Les quatre cents coups is similarly concerned with Paris as a city, and again there is a contrast between affluence (the many shop windows against which Truffaut frames his action) and poverty (the cramped Doinel apartment; various acts of theft). Equally resonant are the oft-noted parallels between Les quatre cents coups and Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. Though the action in Les quatre cents coups is not limited to interiors—the exterior shots of Paris connote a sense of almost lyrical freedom (partly the result of Jean Constantin’s gently energetic score)—the film’s action is effec- tively ‘‘framed’’ by two ‘‘institution’’ sequences, the first in the school where Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is constantly at odds with his teacher, the second in the ‘‘Observation Center for Delinquent Minors’’ to which Antoine is sent after stealing a type- writer. Both settings recall the boys’ boarding school in Vigo’s Zéro de conduite, as Antoine’s revolt against his social and familial circumstances recalls that of Vigo’s quartet of young rebels. Truffaut’s debts to Rossellini and Renoir are as much stylistic as thematic—in both cases it is a matter of camera mobility and take duration, as well as the use of real-world rather than studio sets. But the theme of rebellion against rigid social authority is common both to Rossellini’s and Renoir’s modes of ‘‘film realism.’’ In this regard Les quatre cents coups recalls Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des eaux especially, in setting (Paris) and in its tone of affection for the innocent self- assertiveness of its central character; Boudu polishes his shoes with a fancy bedspread, while Antoine wipes his dirty hands on the dining room drapery. It is also worth remarking that water is an important image in both films—for Boudu, who is ‘‘saved’’ from drowning, only to escape his bourgeois rescuers by eventually returning to the river, and also for Antoine Doinel, who speaks longingly of the sea throughout Les quatre cents coups, and who finds himself (ambiguously) at the seashore at the film’s end. Equally important to the texture and tone of Les quatre cents coups are Truffaut’s references to the American cinema, especially to Hitchcock and Welles. The entire sequence of Antoine’s arrest and detention, for instance, recalls in spirit and detail (right down to Antoine’s hat) a similar sequence in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man; questions are asked, fingerprints or mug shots are taken, and the prisoner is eventually led to his cell. And the sense of shock in both cases follows from the disproportion or dissonance of the accused (Manny is innocent; Antoine was returning the typewriter) and the accusation. Far more central to Les quatre cents coups are its submerged (almost retroactive) relations to the Wellesian cinema. In La nuit américaine the childhood figure of the director played by Truffaut dreams of stealing stills of Citizen Kane through the grill work protecting the front of a local cinema (in Les quatre cents coups Antoine and René filch a still from Bergman’s Sommaren med Monika); in several respects the basic situation in Les quatre cents coups recalls that in Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. In all three films a young boy endeavors to reconcile himself to his mother, and in each instance the father figure is weak to the point of desertion: Kane’s father quickly gives in to the scheme that sends Charlie east with Thatcher, Georgie Amberson’s father dies midway through the narrative, and Antoine Doinel’s stepfather has neither the courage nor the insight to understand the basic honesty and earnestness of Antoine’s attempts to please or to be independent. All of which is especially important given the stylistic and thematic affinity of Truffaut to Welles. That stylistic energy of both Truffaut and Welles is evidenced by the range of their filmic devices; both are masters equally of montage and of long take. And yet in each case the energy evident in film style is set thematically against a lack of energy in the depicted world of the film. The danger is one of denial (as Antoine is eventually denied by his mother) or exhaustion (as Antoine reaches the verge of exhaustion in his long run to the seashore). The alternative—at least for Truffaut—is to find a way of life that allows for repetition, as children ‘‘repeat’’ and hence ‘‘replace’’ their parents, without falling prey to mechanical regimentation or cynical bitterness. It is Madame Doinel’s bitterness toward her own past, toward her son, which is most directly responsible for Antoine’s delinquency and exile. By contrast, Truffaut always works in his films to incorporate the past creatively into the present, to sustain the past by revising and reviewing it. Hence, in Les quatre cents coups he pays homage to the history of cinema (and also literature) in the very process of renewing it, of using it again. And Les quatre cents coups is itself subsequently revised and thereby sustained in a series of films about the further adventures of Antoine Doinel, a series that culmi- nates in L’amour en fuite in which footage from all of the earlier films in the Doinel saga (Les quatre cents coups, Antoine et Collete, Baisers volés, and Domicile conjugal), as well as from Les deux anglais et le continent and La nuit américaine, is recombined with new footage to demonstrate with remarkable clarity and feeling the possibilities for human renewal. —Leland Poague THE QUEEN OF SIN AND THE SPECTACLE OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH See SODOM UND GOMORRHA 991 R RAGING BULL USA, 1980 Director: Martin Scorsese Production: United Artists; part in color, prints by Technicolor; running time: 129 minutes; length: 11,588 feet. Released Novem- ber 1980. Producers: Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, in association with Peter Savage; screenplay: Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, from the book by Jake La Motta with Peter Savage; photography: Michael Chapman; editor: Thelma Schoonmaker; sound recordists: Les Lazarowitz, Michael Evje, Walter Gest, and Gary Ritchie; sound re- recordists: Donald O. Mitchell, Bill Nicholson, and David J. Kimball; sound effects supervising editor: Frank Warner; production de- signer: Gene Rudolf; art directors: Alan Manser, Kirk Axtell, and Raging Bull Sheldon Haber; consultant: Jake La Motta; technical advisers: Frank Topham and Al Silvani. Cast: Robert De Niro (Jake La Motta); Cathy Moriarty (Vickie La Motta); Joe Pesci (Joey La Motta); Frank Vincent (Salvy); Nicholas Colasanto (Tommy Como); Theresa Saldana (Lenore); Mario Gallo (Mario); Frank Adonis (Patsy); Joseph Bono (Guido); Frank Topham (Toppy); Lori Anne Flax (Irma); Charles Scorsese (Charlie, Man with Como); Don Dunphy (Himself); Bill Hanrahan (Eddie Eagen); Rita Bennett (Emma, Miss 48’s); James V. Christy (Dr. Pinto); Bernie Allen (Comedian); Michael Badalucco (Soda Fountain clerk); Tho- mas Beansy Lobasso (Beansy); Paul Forrest (Monsignor); Peter Petrella (Johnny); Geraldine Smith (Janet); Mardik Martin (Copa waiter); Peter Savage (Jackie Curtie); Daniel P. Conte (Detroit Promoter); Joe Malanga (Bodyguard); Allan Malamud (Reporter at Jake’s House); D. J. Blair (State Attorney Bronson); Laura James (Mrs. Bronson); Richard McMurray (J.R.); Mary Albee (Underage ID Girl); Candy Moore (Linda); Nick Trisko (Bartender Carlo); Lou Tiano (Ricky); Allan Joseph (Jeweller); Martin Scorsese (Barbizon Stagehand); Floyd Anderson (Jimmy Reeves); Johnny Barnes (‘‘Sugar’’ Ray Robinson); Kevin Mahon (Tony Janiro); Eddie Mustafa Muham- mad (Billy Fox); Louis Raftis (Marcel Cerdan); Coley Wallis (Joe Louis); Fritzie Higgins (Woman with Vickie); Johnny Turner (Laurent Dauthuille). Awards: Oscars for Best Actor (De Niro) and Best Editing, 1981; BAFTA Award for Best Editing, 1982. Publications Books: Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Arnold, Frank, and others, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Bliss, Michael, Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro, Lon- don, 1986. Cietat, Michel, Martin Scorsese, Paris, 1986. Domecq, Jean-Philippe, Martin Scorsese: Un Rève italo-américain, Renens, Switzerland, 1986. McKay, Keith, Robert De Niro: The Hero Behind the Masks, New York, 1986. Weiss, Ulli, Das neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986. Weiss, Marian, Martin Scorsese: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1987. RAGING BULL FILMS, 4 th EDITION 992 Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese, Philadelphia, 1990. Connelly, Marie Katheryn, Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films, With a Filmography of His Entire Directorial Career, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1993. Kellman, Steven G., editor, Perspectives on Raging Bull, New York, 1994. Bliss, Michael, The Word Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin Scorsese, Lanham, Maryland, 1995, 1998. Friedman, Lawrence S., The Cinema of Martin Scorsese, New York, 1997. Kelly, Mary P., Martin Scorsese: A Journey, New York, 1997. Dougan, Andy, Martin Scorsese—Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998. Brunette, Peter, editor, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Jackson, Missis- sippi, 1999. Articles: Wiener, Thomas, ‘‘Martin Scorsese Fights Back,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), November 1980. Variety (New York), 12 November 1980. Georgakas, Dan, in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1980–81. Thomson, David, ‘‘The Director as Raging Bull,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1981. Gentry, R., ‘‘Michael Chapman Captures Raging Bull in Black and White,’’ in Millimeter (New York), February 1981. Jenkins, Steve, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1981. Millar, Gavin, in Listener (London), 26 February 1981. ‘‘Dialogue on Film: Robert De Niro,’’ in American Film (Washing- ton, D.C.), March 1981. ‘‘Raging Bull Section’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1981. ‘‘Raging Bull Section’’ of Positif (Paris), April 1981. Rinaldi, G., in Cineforum (Bergamo), April 1981. Combs, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1981. Sinyard, Neil, in Films Illustrated (London), May 1981. Williams, A. L., in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), May 1981. Henry, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), June 1981. Cook, Pam, ‘‘Raging Bull: Masculinity in Crisis,’’ in Screen (Lon- don), September-October 1982. Wood, Robin, ‘‘The Homosexual Subtext: Raging Bull,” in Austra- lian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 15–16, 1983. Hemmeter, G. C. and T., ‘‘The Word Made Flesh: Language in Raging Bull,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Mary- land), April 1986. Bruce, Bryan, ‘‘Martin Scorsese: Five Films,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1986. Lane, J., ‘‘Martin Scorsese and the Documentary Impulse,’’ in Framework (London), no. 1, 1991. Sitney, P. A., ‘‘Cinematic Election and Theological Vanity,’’ in Raritan (New Brunswick, New Jersey), no. 2, 1991. Librach, R. S., ‘‘The Last Temptation in Mean Streets and Raging Bull,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1992. Clements, Marcelle, ‘‘Martin Scorsese’s Mortal Sins,’’ in Esquire, vol. 120, no. 5, November 1993. O’Neill, E.R., ‘‘‘Poison’-ous Queers: Violence and Social Order,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 15, no. 1, 1994. Combs, Richard, ‘‘Hell Up in the Bronx,’’ in Sight & Sound (Lon- don), vol. 5, no. 2, February 1995. Borden, L., ‘‘Blood and Redemption,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, February 1995. Scorsese, Martin, ‘‘De Nero & Moi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 500, March 1996. Mortimer, B., ‘‘Portraits of the Postmodern Person in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Los Angeles), vol. 49, no. 1/2, 1997. Thompson, David, ‘‘The Director as Raging Bull: Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Photograph?’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 34, no. 3, May-June 1998. *** Martin Scorsese’s telling of the story of Jake La Motta has given rise to a number of different, often conflicting, readings. For Scorsese himself, La Motta’s trajectory from promising boxer to middleweight champion of the world to night-club performer is the story of ‘‘a guy attaining something and losing everything, and then redeeming himself.’’ Such a reading is clearly reinforced by the quotation from St. John’s gospel preceding the final credits, which tells of a man whose sight has been restored by Christ rebuking the Pharisees: ‘‘Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,’’ the man replied. ‘‘All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see.’’ On this level, La Motta’s life becomes a kind of spiritual odyssey of the kind encoun- tered before in the work of Schrader and Scorsese, both separately and in collaboration one with another. As Scorsese describes La Motta: ‘‘He works on an almost primitive level, almost an animal level. And therefore he must think in a different way, he must be aware of certain things spiritually that we aren’t, because our minds are too cluttered with intellectual ideas, and too much emotionalism. And because he’s on that animalistic level, he may be closer to pure spirit.’’ Others have rejected such an approach as spurious, self-justificatory, high-flown theorizing and have condemned the film as endorsing macho values. On the other hand, there are those who completely invert this argument and, like Neil Sinyard, read Raging Bull as ‘‘a militantly feminist film’’ in that it ‘‘presents men at their most pointlessly repulsive and destructive. The effect of the film is to aim a pulverizing blow at male values.’’ Such contradictory readings and responses become more compre- hensible if one considers the film’s extraordinary style, however, in which it is frequently very difficult to locate any kind of authorial voice or attitude. Scorsese’s presence is clearly there in the film’s frequently stunning visuals, but what does he want us to think of La Motta? As Richard Combs puts it in the course of a long analysis of the film in Sight and Sound, Raging Bull ‘‘seems to have been made out of an impatience with all the usual trappings of cinema, with plot, psychology and an explanatory approach to character.’’ Conversa- tions, though intense in the extreme, are elliptical, muffled, barely heard. There are few ‘‘period’’ traces, and even fewer familiar faces. In spite of the opportunity offered by the trajectory of the real La Motta’s life, Scorsese largely refuses to let the film arrange itself into a conventional rise-and-fall pattern, concentrating instead on simple, often highly elliptical chronological units, with some of La Motta’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARKFILMS, 4 th EDITION 993 fights communicated solely by a still and a title. In all of these details the film differs markedly from the boxer’s autobiography on which it is loosely based and which supplies ‘‘interpretation’’ and background detail in large amounts. What Scorsese has done, however, is to throw out all this ‘‘excess baggage,’’ and to reveal La Motta’s interior drama by means of a rigorous concentration on externals. In this respect, Raging Bull may be his most Bressonian film, in which, as Combs puts it, ‘‘the spirit is only evident in its absence.’’ Several critics, notable among them Robin Wood, have read a homosexual subtext in Raging Bull (and other Scorsese films for that matter). This is at its clearest in the scenes around the Janiro fight. Janiro’s good looks have attracted the attention of La Motta’s wife Vickie, and La Motta is determined to ruin them, although he jokes that he doesn’t know whether to ‘‘fuck him or fight him.’’ Sexual doubts also hover over a scene in which La Motta worries that he has ‘‘girl’s hands,’’ and inform much of the film’s floridly sexual language. According to Wood, traces of repressed homosexuality in Raging Bull ‘‘exist threateningly close to the surface—to the film’s conscious level of articulation—accounting for its relentless and near-hysterical intensity.’’ In the end, it has to be admitted that Raging Bull is a profoundly ambivalent film which refuses to fit easily into Scorsese’s schema or into any straightforwardly feminist analysis either. But neither is it an unproblematic celebration of machismo. One of the few critics sensitive to the film’s ambivalence is Pam Cook who argues that while it does indeed put masculinity in crisis it does not, for all its profoundly disturbing qualities, offer a radical critique of either masculinity or violence: ‘‘The film’s attitude to violence is ambigu- ous. On one hand, it is validated as an essential component of masculinity, making possible resistance to a corrupt and repressive social system. On this level violence is seen as inseparable from desire, and is celebrated. On the other, the tragic scenario of Raging Bull demands that the hero be shown to be the guilty victim of his transgressive desires: his violence is so excessive, so self-destructive that it has to be condemned. . . .The tragic structure of Raging Bull has consequences for its view of masculinity: masculinity is put into crisis so that we can mourn its loss.’’ In this reading La Motta’s ‘‘fall’’ is not the result of some kind of innate guilt or ‘‘original sin’’ but intimately tied up with his social position as a member of the Italian-American immigrant community, a victim-hero desperate to improve the conditions of his existence by becoming a champion boxer but limited by a culture which at one and the same time offered power and success but insisted on the inferior status of Italian immigrants. According to Cook the film thus looks back to a time when the values of the Italian-American community were still current. —Julian Petley RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK USA, 1981 Director: Steven Spielberg Production: Lucasfilm Productions; color, 35mm, Panavision; run- ning time: 115 minutes. Released summer 1981 by Paramount Pictures. Filmed 1980 in France, Tunisia, and Hawaii, and in Elstree Studios, England. Cost: about $20 million. Producer: Frank Marshall; executive producers: George Lucas and Howard Kazanjian; screenplay: Lawrence Kasdan; story: George Lucas and Philip Kaufman; photography: Douglas Slocombe; edi- tor: Michael Kahn; sound effects supervisor: Richard L. Anderson; sound effects editors: Steve H. Flick and Mark Mangini; production designer: Norman Reynolds; art director: Leslie Dilley; music: John Williams; special effects supervisor: Richard Edlund; costume designer: Deborah Nadoolman; stunt co-ordinator: Glenn Randall. Cast: Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones); Karen Allen (Marion Ravenswood); Paul Freeman (Belloq); John Rhys-Davies (Sallah); Wolf Kahler (Dietrich); Ronald Lacey (Toht); Denholm Elliot (Mar- cus Brody). Awards: Oscars for Sound, Visual Effects, Art Direction, and Edit- ing, 1981. Publications Books: Taylor, Derek, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, New York, 1981. Crawley, Tony, The Steven Spielberg Story, London, 1983. Miller, Bob, The Raiders Guide, Sherman, 1983. Goldau, Antje, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Spielberg: Filme als Spielzeug, Berlin, 1985. Honeyford, Paul, Harrison Ford: A Biography, London, 1986. Mott, Donald R., and Cheryl McAllister Saunders, Steven Spielberg, Boston, 1986. Smith, Thomas G., Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects, London, 1986. Weiss, Ulli, Das Neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Clinch, Minty, Harrison Ford: A Biography, London, 1987. Godard, Jean-Pierre, Spielberg, Paris, 1987. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Steven Spielberg, London, 1987. Von Gunden, Kenneth, Postmodern Auteurs: Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg & Scorsese, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1991. Taylor, Philip M., Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning, New York, 1992, 1998. Sanello, Frank, Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology, Dallas, 1996. Brode, Douglas, The Films of Steven Spielberg, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1997. Yule, Andrew, Steven Spielberg, New York, 1997. Knight, Bertram, Steven Spielberg: Master of Movie Magic, Parsippany, New Jersey, 1998. Perry, George, Steven Spielberg-Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998. McBride, Joseph, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, New York, 1999. Friedman, Lester D., and Brent Notbohm, editors, Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Jackson, Mississippi, 2000. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK FILMS, 4 th EDITION 994 Raiders of the Lost Ark Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 5 June 1981. Variety (New York), 5 June 1981. New York Times, 12 June 1981. Newsweek (New York), 15 June 1981. New Yorker, 15 June 1981. Time (New York), 15 June 1981. New Republic (New York), 4–11 July 1981. Reiss, D., interview with Steven Spielberg, in Filmmakers Monthly (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), July-August 1981. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1981. Films (London), August 1981. Furtak, G., in Films in Review (New York), September-August 1981. Benayoun, Robert, ‘‘Le Retour au plaisir,’’ in Positif (Paris), Septem- ber 1981. Mérigeau, P., in Image et Son (Paris), September 1981. Pa?ni, D., in Cinéma (Paris), September 1981. Tonnerre, J., in Cinématographe (Paris), September 1981. Assayas, O., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1981. Martini, E., in Cineforum (Bergamo), October 1981. Shay, D., ‘‘The Wrath of God and Other Illusions,’’ in Cinefex (Riverside, California), October 1981. ‘‘Raiders of the Lost Ark Section’’ of American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), November 1981. Filme (Paris), November-December 1981. Ecran Fantastique (Paris), nos. 21 and 22, 1981–82. Neale, Stephen, ‘‘Hollywood Corner,’’ in Framework (Norwich), 1982. Wilson, John, in Magill’s Cinema Annual, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982. Orto, N., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), February 1982. Auty, Chris, ‘‘The Complete Spielberg?,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Autumn 1982. Tomasulo, F. P., ‘‘Mr. Jones Goes to Washington: Myth and Religion in Raiders of the Lost Ark,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Fall 1982. Dorminsky, M., in Cinema Novo (Porto), September-October 1982. Zimmerman, Patricia R., ‘‘Soldiers of Fortune: Lucas, Spielberg, Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 6, no. 2, 1984. Rissik, A., ‘‘Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the 007 Myth,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1984. RANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 995 Cinéfantastique (Paris), May 1985. Noel, J., ‘‘Steven Spielberg (Suite No. 4),’’ in Grand Angle (Mariembourg, Belgium), September 1990. Sheehan, H., ‘‘The Panning of Steven Spielberg,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1992. Deemer, Charles, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Action: Five Classic Action Scenes,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 2, no. 4, Winter 1995. Aronstein, S., ‘‘‘Not Exactly a Knight:’ Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the ‘Indiana Jones’ Trilogy,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 34, no. 4, 1995. Bond, J., in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), no. 62, October 1995. Larson, R.D., in Soundtrack!: The Collector’s Quarterly (Mechelen), vol. 15, June 1996. Score (Lelystad), no. 99, June 1996. *** Raiders of the Lost Ark is historically important because it marks the first collaboration between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the two most financially successful of American filmmakers. Released in the summer of 1981, the film garnered some of the best critical accolades in either man’s career; it also continued their phenomenal success: it is now one of the top ten money-makers of all time. An homage to old movie serials in much the same way as are George Lucas’s Star Wars films, Raiders is also derivative of westerns, horror films, war films and James Bond films. In fact, Lucas reportedly mentioned his Raiders story to Spielberg in 1977 after Spielberg said that he had always wanted to make a James Bond film. Raiders even opens with an initial adventure scene unrelated to the main story of the film, a device used in the James Bond films. Relying on Spielberg’s TV experience and extensive ‘‘storyboarding,’’ the elaborate action film was shot in 73 days in France, Tunisia, Hawaii, and the famed Elstree Studios in England, which Lucas also used for his Star Wars films. Special effects for the film were made at Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilms’ own facility in northern California. Spielberg used English cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who worked on his Close Encounters, and editor Michael Kahn, who edited Close Encounters and 1941. Spielberg also brought screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to Lucas’s attention. The primary distinction of Raiders, in addition to its constant high level of thrills and chills, is the vivid portrayal of its hero, Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford. As Spielberg himself has said, Ford in this film is a combination of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A vulnerable but heroic figure, Ford’s Indiana Jones also has a shad- owy side. Indiana’s search for the Ark which contains the original Ten Commandments becomes a dark obsession, a passion that causes him twice to abandon the film’s heroine, Marion Ravenswood, played by Karen Allen. Around this larger than life hero, Lucas and Spielberg weave a tale of intrigue and adventure, full of Nazi villains, a nasty but engaging Frenchman who is Indy’s rival and shadowy double, and numerous references to Biblical and Egyptian mythology. There is an atmos- phere of evil and mysterious power, and a demonic transformation of many of the film’s settings and props. Thus, the ancient city of Tanis in Raiders has become deserted wasteland, an Egyptian temple becomes the prison full of snakes for Indy and Marion, and the mysterious Ark of the Covenant brings fiery destruction to the Nazis. In the end, the Ark eludes Indy’s grasp and is tucked away in an immense warehouse, a scene reminiscent of the last shot in Citizen Kane. Through the course of the film, Indy discovers that he is both free and bound—although he loses the Ark, he does get Marion. In this respect the film seems to be saying, True love or friendship is its own reward. —Thomas Snyder RAISE THE RED LANTERN See DAHONG DENGLONG GAOGAO GUA RAN France-Japan, 1985 Director: Akira Kurosawa Production: Greenwich Film Productions (Paris)/Herald Ace/Nippon Herald Films (Tokyo); in color, Dolby Stereo; running time: 160 minutes; length: 14,435 feet. Released 1985. Executive producer: Katsumi Furukawa; producers: Serge Silberman, Masato Hara; screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide; photography: Takao Saito, Masaharu Ueda, Asakazu Nakai; sound recordists: Fumio Yanoguchi, Shotaro Yoshida; sound re-recordist: Claude Villand; production designers: Yoshiro Muraki, Shinobu Muraki; costume designer: Emi Wada; music: Toru Takemitsu; musical director: Hiroyuki Iwaki. Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Hidetora Ichimonji); Akira Terao (Taro Takatora Ichimonji); Jinpachi Nezu (Jiro Masatora Ichimonji); Daisuke Ryu (Saburo Naotora Ichimonji); Mieko Harada (Lady Kaede); Yoshiko Miyazaki (Lady Sue); Kazuo Kato (Kageyu Ikoma); Shinnosuke Ikehata (Kyoami); Hitoshi Ueki (Nobuhiro Fujimaki); Jun Tazaki (Seiji Ayabe); Norio Matsui (Shumenosuke Ogura); Hisashi Igawa (Shuri Kurogane); Kenji Kodama (Samon Shirane); Toshiya Ito (Mondo Naganuma); Takeshi Kato (Koyata Hatakeyama); Takeshi Nomura (Tsurumaru); Masayuki Yui (Tango Hirayama); Heihachiro Suzuki (Fujimaki’s General); Haruko Togo (Kaede’s Old Lady). Awards: Oscar for Best Costume Design, 1985. BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film, 1986. Publications Script: Kurosawa, Akira, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide, Ran, Boston, 1986. Books: Raisom, Bertrand, with Serge Toubiana, Le Livre de Ran, Paris, 1985. Davies, Anthony, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, New York,1988. RAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 996 Ran Chang, Kevin K.W., editor, Kurosawa: Perceptions on Life: An Anthology of Essays, Honolulu, 1991. Prince, Stephen, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton, New Jersey, 1991; revised and expanded edition, 1999. Goodwin, James, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, Balti- more, 1994. Goodwin, James, editor, Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, New York, 1994. Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, with Joan Mellen, Berkeley, 1996. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cin- ema, Durham, North Carolina, 2000. Articles: Bock, Audie, in American Film (Washington, D.C.), December 1984. Variety (New York), 5 June 1985. ‘‘Ran Issue’’ of Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1985. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘Samurai Lear,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), September 1985. Grilli, Peter, ‘‘Production Diary,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1985. ‘‘Ran Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), October 1985. Larsen, J. Kornum, ‘‘Interview med Akira Kurosawa,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), October 1985. Nave, B., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), November-December 1985. Silberman, Rob, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 14, no. 4, 1986. Roth-Lindberg, O., in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 28, no. 1, 1986. Ross, T. J., in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Winter 1986. Simons, J., in Skrien (Amsterdam), February-March 1986. Sigal, Clancy, in Listener (London), 13 March 1986. Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, April 1986, December 1987, and December 1988. Fisher, B., in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), April and July 1986. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1986. Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1986. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), June-August 1986. Roddick, Nick, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), September 1986. Thompson, A., ‘‘Kurosawa’s Ran: Reception and Interpretation,’’ in East-West Film Journal (Honolulu), vol. 3, no. 2, 1989. RASHOMONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 997 Forgach, A., ‘‘A kaosz gyemanttengelye,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 7, 1990. Bannon, C. J., ‘‘Man and Nature in Ran and King Lear,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 4, 1991. Avant Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June-July 1991. Geist, K., ‘‘Late Kurosawa: Kagemusha and Ran,’’ in Post Script (Commerce, Texas), no. 1, 1992. Revesz, A., ‘‘Bolondok roppant szinpadan,’’ in Filmkultura (Buda- pest), no. 5, 1992. Vidal Estevez, M., ‘‘William Akira Shakespeare Kurosawa,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 8, February 1992. Crowl, S., ‘‘The Bow is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawa’s Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 22, no. 2, April 1994. Manheim, M., ‘‘The Function of Battle Imagery in Kurosawa’s Histories and the Henry V films,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 22, no. 2, April 1994. Howlett, Kathy, ‘‘Are You Trying to Make Me Commit Suicide?: Gender Identity, and Spacial Arrangement in Kurosawa’s Ran,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 24, no. 4, October 1996. Kane, Julie, ‘‘From the Baroque to Wabi: Translating Animal Imagery from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Kurosawa’s Ran,’’ in Litera- ture/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 25, no. 2, April 1997. *** Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is not so much an homage to Shakespeare’s King Lear as it is a re-examination and deepening of its main themes and ideas. Shakespeare’s story is built on all the elemental themes which have characteristically interested Kurosawa: greed, betrayal, and disloyalty to codes of personal honor. In Kurosawa’s hands these themes become contemporary and expansive despite the fact that the film is set in feudal Japan. Ultimately, Kurosawa achieves this universality because Ran is an almost complete marriage of content and style. Kurosawa turns to many of the stylistic techniques that have come to be associated with his career. Sweeping panoramas, rich and powerful shot composition, and dramatic depth within the frame accomplished by combinations of back and foreground action and layers of synchronously recorded sound are the building blocks out of which Ran grows. For example, Kurosawa creates conflict and dynamism within the frame with contrapuntal movement. When troops are laying siege to the aging warlord’s castle, regiments of samurai pass in front of the camera, some running horizontally, others directly away from or directly toward the camera. There is a sense of chaos that is heightened by the red and yellow banners each soldier wears according to his allegiance. Visually the battle is a melee of red and yellow banners blowing freely, falling out of sight as troops fall, and finally the yellow are simply engulfed by the red. Shot composition has also been one of the earmarks of Kurosawa’s career. While many modern filmmakers have gone to the moving camera as a staple of their visual style, Kurosawa has remained loyal to the still frame and stationary camera. Ran is little different in this regard, since essentially it is constructed from a series of still frames, each one a painting come to life. During the battle at the warlord’s castle, for example, the shots of troops rushing to do battle are juxtaposed with still shots of bodies heaped on top of each other and battlements burning in silent agony. Each of these shots is composed with an eye to detail and maximizing its power while it is on the screen. The true technical virtuosity of Ran, though, lies in the post- production stage. The power inherent in the visuals is given depth and dimension when the externals—elements such as sound effects and music—are added. As the captain of the warlord’s army dies, for example, he calls out to his master, ‘‘We are truly in hell.’’ As he does, the sounds of battle are replaced by a tranquil, orchestral theme which plays point-counterpoint with the ongoing images of death and destruction. It is as if we are truly standing back watching hell rise up until that moment when we are brought back to the film’s present by screams from within it. It has been said that Akira Kurosawa’s work in the work of images, and is therefore concerned not with things but with ideas and metaphors. This being the case, in Ran the still frame is the world that has grown stagnant and is being destroyed from within by the visual turmoil. The film ends with a shot of the warlord’s greedy, traitorous daughter-in-law standing on a mountain peak watching the return of troops that have slaughtered her allies. At the moment when the camera holds her in long shot, eclipsing a blood-red sunset, we too are standing on the precipice, a footfall away from falling into the abyss. —Rob Winning RASHOMON Japan, 1950 Director: Akira Kurosawa Production: Daiei Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 88 minutes; length: 2406 meters. Released 25 August 1950, Tokyo. Filmed at Daiei Studios on outdoor sets. Producers: Jingo Minuro, later titles list Masaichi Nagata; screen- play: Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa, from two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa; photography: Kazuo Miyagawa; art directors: So Matsuyama (some sources list Takashi Matsuyama); music: Fumio Hayasaka. Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Tajomaru, the bandit); Masayuki Mori (Takehiro, the samurai); Machiko Kyo (Masago, his wife); Takashi Shimura (Woodcutter); Minoru Chiaki (Priest); Kichijiro Ueda (The commoner); Daisuke Kato (Police agent); Fumiko Homma (The medium). Awards: Venice Film Festival, Best Film: Lion of St. Mark, 1951; Honorary Oscar as most outstanding foreign film, 1951. Publications Script: Hashimoto, Shinobu, and Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon: A Film by Akira Kurosawa, edited by Donald Richie, New York, 1969; also published as Rashomon, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987. RASHOMON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 998 Rashomon Books: Hashimoto, Shinobu, and Marcel Giuglaris, Le Cinéma japonais (1896–1955), Paris, 1956. Tyler, Parker, The Three Faces of Film, New York, 1960. Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Los Angeles, 1965; revised edition, with Joan Mellen, Berkeley, 1984, 1996. Richie, Donald, Focus on Kurosawa, New York, 1972. Tucker, Richard, Japan: Film Image, London, 1973. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Erens, Patricia, Akira Kurosawa: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Kurosawa, Akira, Something Like an Autobiography, New York, 1982. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Desser, David, The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1983. Tassone, Aldo, Akira Kurosawa, Paris, 1983. Jarvie, Ian, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthet- ics, London, 1987. Richie, Donald, editor, Rashomon: Akira Kurosawa, Director, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987. Chang, Kevin K.W., editor, Kurosawa: Perceptions on Life: An Anthology of Essays, Honolulu, 1991. Prince, Stephen, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton, New Jersey, 1991; revised and expanded edition, 1999. Goodwin, James, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, Balti- more, 1994. Goodwin, James, editor, Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, New York, 1994. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cin- ema, Durham, North Carolina, 2000. Articles: Jacchia, Paolo, ‘‘Drama and Lesson of the Defeated,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), October 1951. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 27 December 1951. McCarten, John, in New Yorker, 29 December 1951. Farber, Manny, in Nation (New York), 19 January 1952. Griffith, Richard, in Saturday Review (New York), 19 January 1952. Life (New York), 21 January 1952. Ghelli, Nino, in Bianco e Nero (Rome), March 1952. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 15 March 1952. Harrington, Curtis, ‘‘Rashomon et le cinéma japonais,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1952. Barbarow, George, in Hudson Review (New York), Autumn 1952. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 6 January 1962. (R. 1952?) Harcourt-Smith, Simon, in Sight and Sound (London), July-Septem- ber 1952. Mercier, Pierre, ‘‘Rashomon et le pédantisme,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1953. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Existe-t-il un néorealisme japonais?,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1953. Davidson, James F., ‘‘Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon,’’ in Antioch Review (Yellow Springs, Ohio), Decem- ber 1954. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis, in Cinéma (Paris), June-July 1955. Leyda, Jay, in Film Culture (New York), no. 10, 1956. Iida, Shinbi, ‘‘Kurosawa,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), August-Sep- tember 1963. ‘‘Akira Kurosawa,’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), Spring 1964. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Kurosawa on Kurosawa,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer and Autumn 1964. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 15 October 1964. Iwasaki, Akira, ‘‘Kurosawa and His Work,’’ in Japan Quarterly, January-March 1965. Pinto, Alfonso, ‘‘Akira Kurosawa,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1967. Tyler, Parker, ‘‘Rashomon as Modern Art,’’ in Renaissance of the Film, edited by Julius Bellone, London, 1970. Mellen, Joan, ‘‘The Epic Cinema of Kurosawa,’’ in Take One (Montreal), June 1971. Almendarez, Valentin, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 19 March 1974. Kauffmann, Stanley, in Horizon (Los Angeles), Spring 1974. Poppelaars, G., in Skoop (Amsterdam), August 1980. McDonald, K. I., ‘‘Light and Darkness in Rashomon,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 10, no. 2, 1982. Tucker, G. M., in Soundtrack (Los Angeles), June 1985. Jones, Elizabeth, ‘‘Locating Truth in Film 1940–80,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Autumn 1986. RASHOMONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 999 Boyd, D., ‘‘Rashomon: From Akutagawa to Kurosawa,’’ in Litera- ture/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 15, no. 3, 1987. Guneratne, A., ‘‘Cinehistory and the Puzzling Case of Martin Guerre,’’ in Film & History (Coral Gables, Florida), no. 1, 1991. Medine, D., ‘‘Law and Kurosawa’s Rashomon,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1992. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 179, July-August 1995. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘From Asia’s Film Factories: 10 Golden Greats,’’ in Time International, vol. 154, no. 7/8, 23 August 1999. *** When Rashomon won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival in 1951, the event represented the opening of the Japanese cinema to the West, and the film itself was regarded as a revelation. Ironically, it has never been very highly thought of in Japan. This does not necessarily mean that the West was wrong (consider the number of major Hollywood films that had to wait to be discovered by the French). It should, however, make us pause to question the grounds for its acclamation. The film’s exotic appeal is very obvious, and in some respects inseparable from its genuine qualities—the originality of its structure, the bravura virtuosity of its camera work, the strength and force of the performances—its success at Venice (and subsequently throughout the western world) was doubtless due to its fortuitous knack of combining the exotic with the appearance of precisely the kind of spurious profundity that western intellectuals have tended to see as necessary for the validation of cinema as an art form. The film was (mis-)taken for a vast metaphysical statement (or, at least, question) along the lines of ‘‘What is truth?’’ Little wonder that there has been a considerable backlash. The initial mis-recognition of Rashomon no doubt played its part in the subsequent rejection of Kurosawa by numerous critics in the process of discovering Ozu and Mizoguchi. Re-seeing the film now, one is apt to challenge both extremes. The ‘‘What is truth?’’ school of Rashomon admirers always (quite understandably) felt some embarrassment at the film’s ending: the film’s ‘‘great subject’’ seemed suddenly displaced and evaded, the film collapsing in ‘‘sentimentality’’: certainly a poor woodcutter deciding to adopt an abandoned baby seems to have little relevance to a philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth and reality. It is, however, open to question whether a demonstration that different people will tell the same story in different ways to suit their own convenience really amounts to such philosophical inquiry in the first place. There is no evidence anywhere in Kurosawa’s work to suggest that he is a profound ‘‘thinker.’’ That is not at all to belittle him as an artist, philosophy and art (though capable of intimate inter-relation- ships) being quite distinct human activities with quite distinct func- tions. To demand that a work of art be philosophically profound is merely a crass form of intellectual snobbery. (This is not of course to deny that all art has philosophical implications, which is another matter altogether.) One must, as always, ‘‘Never trust the artist—trust the tale’’; yet Kurosawa’s own far more modest and earthly account of Rashomon’s subject (from his splendid and delightful Something Like an Autobi- ography) seems to me to tally more satisfactorily with the actual film: Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem . . . . This account has a number of advantages. For one thing, it ties the film in closely with Kurosawa’s other work, as the ‘‘relativity of truth’’ account does not. For one example, the last third of Ikiru is singlemindedly concerned with the gradual revelation of an unquestioned and authentic ‘‘truth’’ that the self-serving bureaucrats are bent on concealing. For another, it accords much more readily with the general tone and attitude of Kurosawa’s films—what one might describe as a bitter humanism, a tenacious belief in the human spirit and in human goodness juxtaposed with a caustic and often savage view of human egoism, duplicity and pettiness. Thirdly, it is much more compatible than philosophical abstractions with one of Rashomon’s most immediately striking qualities, its intense physicality, the direct visual communication of sensory experience. It also makes perfect sense of the ending, which becomes, indeed, the logical and very moving culmination of the whole film. Rashomon is adapted from two very short stories by Akutagawa. The first, ‘‘In a Grove,’’ provides the basis for the main body of the film; the second, ‘‘Rashomon’’ (the name of the ruined stone gate), is the framing story; the two are brilliantly tied together by the woodcut- ter’s narration of the final version of the story. What many westerners fail to recognize is how funny the film is—at least in part. The use of its premise by the Hollywood cinema is well-known: there are Martin Ritt’s painstakingly literal (and somewhat labored) translation of it to the American southwest (The Outrage), and George Cukor’s marvel- ous transformation of its premise into the basis for a musical comedy (Les Girls). But the Hollywood movie that seems closest to Rashomon in structure actually antedates it: Unfaithfully Yours. Sturges’s comedy gives us three quasi-serious episodes (Rex Harrison’s fantasies) which prove to be but the necessary build-up to the final, comic, episode, in which the protagonist attempts to put his fantasies into action. Rashomon follows the same pattern: the first three ‘‘full’’ versions of the story (the bandit’s, the wife’s, the nobleman’s)— which certainly contain their longeurs—are best read as the equally necessary preliminary to the explosion of savage farce in the wood- cutter’s version. The function of the farce in both films is strikingly similar: the deflation of presumption and pretension. We are not invited to read the woodcutter’s story as ‘‘the truth,’’ yet its status is clearly different from that of the other three: its purpose is not that of bolstering his own ego. It is especially important that his version uses the woman as its central figure to make the two men look ridiculous: the proletarian and the woman fuse for the purpose of puncturing class pretension and male egoism. The woodcutter is the real hero of the film and a fully characteris- tic Kurosawa hero, a point underlined by the casting, since Takashi Shimura also plays the heros of Ikiru and The Seven Samurai. His adopting the baby (although he and his family are near starvation- level) follows logically from the scathing denunciation of self-serving egoism that is the central impulse of his version of the story: rising above the moral squalor of his time and the physical squalor of his environment, he performs the action that at once establishes his heroic status and redeems the film’s almost desperate, almost nihilist view of humanity. —Robin Wood REAR WINDOW FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1000 THE RAT TRAP See ELIPPATHAYAM REAR WINDOW USA, 1954 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Paramount Pictures; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 112 minutes. Released 1954. Filmed 1954 in Paramount studios and backlots. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay: John MichaelHayes, from the novel by Cornell Woolrich; photography: Robert Burks; editor: George Tomasini; sound: Harry Lindgren and John Cope; produc- tion designers: Hal Pereira, Ray Mayer, Sam Comer, and MacMillan Johnson; music: Franz Waxman; special effects: John P. Fulton; costume designer: Edith Head. Cast: James Stewart (L. B. Jeffries); Grace Kelly (Lisa Fremont); Wendell Corey (Detective Thomas J. Doyle); Thelma Ritter (Stella); Raymond Burr (Lars Thorwald); Judith Evelyn (Miss Lonely Hearts); Ross Bagdasarian (The Composer); Georgine Darcy (Miss Torso, the dancer); Jesslyn Fax (Sculptress); Rand Harper (Honeymooner); Irene Winston (Mrs. Thorwald). Awards: New York Film Critics’ Award, Best Actress to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl, Rear Window, and Dial M for Murder, 1954. Publications Books: Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Amengual, Barthélemy, Hitchcock, Paris, 1960. Bogdanovitch, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. Manz, Hans-Peter, Alfred Hitchcock, Zurich, 1962. Perry, George, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1965. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Kittredge, William, and Steven M. Krauzer, editors, Stories into Film, New York, 1979. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1967. Simsolo, Noel, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1969. Russell Taylor, John, Hitch, New York, 1978. Bellour, Raymond, L’Analyse du film, Paris, 1979. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1982; London, 1983. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Barbier, Philippe, and Jacques Moreau, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die Dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcocks, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Thomas, Tony, A Wonderful Life: The Films and Career of James Stewart, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1988. Finler, Joel W., Hitchcock in Hollywood, New York, 1992. Sterritt, David, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1993. Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Auiler, Dan, Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1999. Freedman, Jonathan, and Richard Millington, editors, Hitchcock’s America, New York, 1999. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1999. Articles: Sondheim, Steve, in Films in Review (New York), October 1954. May, Derwent, in Sight and Sound (London), October-December 1954. Borneman, Ernest, in Films and Filming (London), November 1954. Arland, R. M., in Arts (Paris), 6 April 1955. Garson, G., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1955. Chabrol, Claude, in Téléciné (Paris), May-June 1955. Positif (Paris), November 1955. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Septem- ber 1956. Pett, John, in Films and Filming (London), November and Decem- ber 1959. Douchet, Jean, ‘‘Hitch and His Public,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, no. 7, 1961. Agel, Alfred, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, no. 15, 1961. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Hitchcock’s World,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), December 1962-January 1963. Sweigert, William R., ‘‘James Stewart,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1964. Sonbert, Warren, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Morality,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1966. Hitchcock, Alfred, in Take One (Montreal), December 1968. Scarrone, C., in Filmcritica (Florence), January 1981. Delpeut, P., and E. Kuyper, in Skrien (Amsterdam), September 1981. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Camera/Stylo (Paris), November 1981. Stam, R., and R. Pearson, ‘‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1983. Strick, Philip, in Films and Filming (London), November 1983. REAR WINDOWFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1001 Wood, Robin, ‘‘Fear of Spying,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), November 1983. Chion, M., ‘‘Le Quatrième C?te,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1984. Jenkins, Steve, ‘‘Hitchcock [x] 2: Refocusing the Spectator,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1984. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), February 1984. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘Hitch’s Riddle,’’ in Film Comment (New York), June 1984. Aubenas, J., in Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), Autumn 1984. Duval, B., and R. Lefèvre, ‘‘Hitchcock Dossier,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), January 1985. Perlmutter, Ruth, ‘‘Rear Window: A ‘Construction-Story,’’’ in Jour- nal of Film and Video (River Forest, Illinois), Spring 1985. Palmer, R. Barton, ‘‘The Metafictional Hitchcock: The Experience of Viewing and the Viewing of Experience in Rear Window and Psycho,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Winter 1986. Miller, G., ‘‘Beyond the Frame: Hitchcock, Art and the Ideal,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Winter 1986. Allen, Jeanne T., and R. Barton Palmer, ‘‘Dialogue on Spectatorship,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Summer 1986. Harris, Thomas, ‘‘Rear Window and Blow Up: Hitchcock’s Straight- forwardness vs Antonioni’s Ambiguity,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 15, no. 1, 1987. Atkinson, D., ‘‘Hitchcock’s Techniques Tell Rear Window Story,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), January 1990. Weinstock, J., ‘‘5 Minutes to Alexanderplatz,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington, Indiana), September 1991. Smith, J., ‘‘The Strange Case of Lars Thorwald: Rounding Up the Usual Suspect in Rear Window,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 2, 1992. Leconte, B., ‘‘Fenetre sur film,’’ in Review du Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1992. Odabashian, B., ‘‘The Unspeakable Crime in Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Hero as Lay Detective, Spectator as Lay Analyst,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier, Ohio), Fall 1993. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 13, 1994. Mooney, J., ‘‘Grace Kelly in Rear Window,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 7, January/February 1996. Garmon, Ronald Dale, ‘‘Stalking the Blue-Chip Nightmare: The Two Legacies of Cornell Woolrich,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock, New Jersey), no. 21, Winter 1996. Valley, Richard, ‘‘The Hayes Office: John Michael Hayes,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock, New Jersey), no. 21, Winter 1996. Stempel, Tom, ‘‘Rear Window: A John Michael Hayes Film,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 4, 1997. Ehrlich, L.C., ‘‘Courtyards of Shadow and Light,’’ in Cinemaya (New Delhi), no. 37, Summer 1997. Mogg, K., ‘‘Rear Window in the News,’’ in Macguffin (East Mel- bourne), no. 23, November 1997. Care, Ross, ‘‘Rear Window: The Music of Sound,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock, New Jersey), no. 37, 2000. *** In his article on ‘‘Film Production’’ for the 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica Alfred Hitchcock gave the following example of ‘‘pure cinema:’’ ‘‘Show a man looking at something, say a baby. Then show him smiling. By placing these shots in sequence—man looking, object seen, reaction to object—the director characterizes the man as a kindly person. Retain shot one (the look) and shot three (the smile) and substitute for the baby a girl in a bathing costume, and the director has changed the characterization of the man.’’ In these terms, his 1954 film, Rear Window, would be a sustained exercise in pure cinema. It is a film about the power, the pleasure, and the moral (and even physical) danger inherent in the shot/countershot alternation Hitch- cock takes to be at the heart of cinematic representation. His protago- nist, the news photographer L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart), confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, experiences alternately the thrills and fears of a filmmaker and a moviegoer as he unravels a murder story from the fragmentary evidence he manages to glimpse from the rear window of his second storey apartment. Hitchcock had an unusually large set constructed to represent the interior courtyard of a New York City apartment complex in a lower middle-class neighborhood. The array of characters visible to the peeping Jeffries exteriorize the tensions and dynamics of his sexual fantasies. They are known to us by the names he assigns them: Miss Torso, a scantily dressed dancer attracts his prurient interest as she exercises or entertains her many suitors; the Newlyweds carry on behind a drawn shade, but when the husband appears at the window for a respite his insatiable wife calls him back for more activity; a middle-aged Miss Lonelyhearts comes to the verge of suicide in her failure to find a suitable companion; an older couple sleep on the fire escape hot summer nights, head to foot; a father is briefly seen dressing his very young daughter. At opposite ends of the courtyard are two artists, of image and sound, corresponding to the two tracks of a film. A middle-aged woman at one side makes modernist sculpture: her annular creation, Hunger, suggests sexual as well as gastronomic need. Her opposite is a young male composer of songs, who drinks too much until his music brings him together with Miss Lonelyhearts. In the center of this psychic microcosm, a row of windows like a strip of cinematic frames looks in on the apartment of the unhappily married Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) and his bedridden wife. When Mrs. Thorwald disappears, Jeffries convinces himself, his doting girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and eventually his visiting nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), that Thorwald has murdered her, dismembered her body in the bath-tub, buried some of her limbs in the courtyard, and mailed the rest in a trunk. Most of the drama is concentrated in the confines of Jeffries’s small apartment. Lisa, an affluent fashion designer, is so eager to get a permanent commitment from the reluctant Jeffries that she has his meals catered from the Stork Club, and ignores his discouragement when she comes to spend the night in the apartment. Stella, a voice of earthy common sense, insists that there must be something wrong with Jeffries to reject the attention of someone like Lisa. Although she puts up a formidable resistance to his ‘‘ghoulish’’ fascination with the Thorwalds, she too enters his fantasy and joins Lisa in a hunt for limbs under flower beds in the yard. Behind the witty comedy of Lisa’s seductions and Stella’s homely analogies, Hitchcock explores the sexual trauma at the core of Jeffries’s fear of marriage as if it were linked to the scopophiliac pleasure involved in film-viewing. As Jeffries becomes engrossed with the evidence of his murder story, he uses his large telephoto lens to get close-up views of Thorwald’s rooms. The changes of lenses indicates an optical erection. Lisa instinctually recognizes that the way to Jeffries’s heart is through his eyes. She calls her overnight lingerie a ‘‘preview of coming attractions.’’ She threatens to rent REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1002 a back apartment and do Salome’s dance of the seven veils unless he pays more attention to her. When threats and enticements fail, she actually enters his fantasy, first digging with Stella in the yard, then climbing into Thorwald’s apartment, when he is out, to find incrimi- nating evidence: his wife’s ring. Thorwald catches her in the act, but Jeffries saves her by telephoning the police. Significantly, it is when she signals to Jeffries that she has found the ring—by putting it on her finger and waving it behind her back toward his window—that Thorwald triangulates the view and thus spots Jeffries as a mortal threat. This is the moment when Lisa’s fantasy, symbolized by the wearing of the ring, coincides with Jeffries’s masochistic excitement at seeing her gravely threatened. Thorwald then breaks the cinematic analogy by looking directly at Jeffries, as if an actor could see a spectator. Within the psychodynamics of the film as well as the rules of the genre, this is the beginning of the inevitable denouement. Once the immobile Jeffries becomes the potential victim his identification with Mrs. Thorwald is complete. His latent fantasy of being the victim of male aggression comes to the fore, and the Oedipal nature of his erotic confusion is underlined by his last minute efforts to blind temporarily the attacking Thorwald with flashes of his camera lights. Jeffries survives the attacks with another broken leg, whereby Hitchcock suggests that his fantasy is doomed to repetition. A series of black jokes about the limb the police have recovered culminates in a Freudian topos: they have it in a hatbox. This body part which we never see, but seek through the second half of the film, is both Mrs. Thorwald’s head and imaginatively her castrated phallus; for the latter fantasy is central to Jeffries’s voyeurism and his fear of women. —P. Adams Sitney REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE USA, 1955 Director: Nicholas Ray Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; Warnercolor, 35mm, Cinemascope; running time: 111 minutes. Released 1955. Filmed in 9 weeks in 1955. Producer: David Weisbart; screenplay: Stewart Stern, from an adaptation by Irving Shulman of a storyline by Nicholas Ray inspired from the story ‘‘The Blind Run’’; title: from a book by Dr. Robert M. Lindner (1944); photography: Ernest Haller; editor: William Ziegler; production designer: William Wallace; music: Leonard Rosenman. Cast: James Dean (Jim Stark); Natalie Wood (Judy); Jim Backus (Jim’s father); Ann Doran (Jim’s mother); Rochelle Hudson (Judy’s mother); William Hopper (Judy’s father); Sal Mineo (Plato); Corey Allen (Buzz); Dennis Hopper (Goon); Ed Platt (Ray); Steffi Sydney (Mil); Marietta Canty (Plato’s nursemaid); Virginia Brissac (Jim’s grandmother); Beverly Long (Helen); Frank Mazzola (Crunch); Robert Foulk (Gene); Jack Simmons (Cookie); Nick Adams (Moose). Publications Script: Stern, Stewart, Rebel Without a Cause, in Best American Screenplays, edited by Sam Thomas, New York, 1986. Books: Bast, William, James Dean: A Biography, New York, 1956. Thomas, T. T., I, James Dean, New York, 1957. Backus, Jim, Rocks on the Roof, New York, 1958. Whittman, Mark, The Films of James Dean, London, 1974. Dalton, David, James Dean—The Mutant King, San Francisco, 1974. Herndon, Venable, James Dean—A Short Life, New York, 1974. Kreidl, John, Nicholas Ray, Boston, 1977. McGee, Mark Thomas, and R.J. Robertson, The JD Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1982. Masi, Stefano, Nicholas Ray, Florence, 1983. Morrissey, Steven, James Dean Is Not Dead, Manchester, 1983. Blaine, Allan, Nicholas Ray: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Dalton, David, and Ron Cayen, James Dean: American Icon, Lon- don, 1984. Hillier, Jim, editor, Cahiers du Cinéma 1: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London, 1985. Beath, Warren Newton, The Death of James Dean, London, 1986. Erice, Victor, and Jos Oliver, Nicholas Ray y su tiempo, Madrid, 1986. Wilson, George M., Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point- of-View, Baltimore, Maryland, 1986. Giuliani, Pierre, Nicholas Ray, Paris, 1987. Wagner, Jean, Nicholas Ray, Paris, 1987. Grob, Norbert, and Manuela Reichart, Ray, Berlin, 1989. Parker, John, Five for Hollywood, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1991. Eisenschitz, Bernard, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, translated by Tom Milne, London, 1993. McCann, Graham, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando, and Dean, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1993. Alexander, Paul, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean, New York, 1994. Hofstede, David, James Dean: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, Con- necticut, 1996. Spoto, Donald, Rebel, New York, 1997. Tanitch, R., James Dean the Actor, London, 1999. Articles: Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Generation Without a Cause,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 7, 1956. ‘‘Portrait de l’acteur en jeune homme,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 66, 1956. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Rebels Without Causes,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Ray, Nicholas, ‘‘Story into Script,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1956. Cole, Clayton, ‘‘The Dean Myth,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1957. Houston, Penelope, and John Gillett, ‘‘Conversations with Nicho- las Ray and Joseph Losey,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1961. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1003 Rebel Without a Cause Kempton, Murray, ‘‘Mother, Men and the Muse,’’ in Show (Holly- wood), March 1962. Walters, R., ‘‘Enhancement of Punitive Behavior by Audio-Visual Displays,’’ in Science, 8 June 1962. Bean, Robin, ‘‘Dean—10 Years After,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October 1965. ‘‘La Fureur de vivre,’’ in Arts et Spectacles (Paris), 15 May 1967. Godfrey, Lionel, ‘‘Because They’re Young—Parts I and II,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October and November 1967. Kael, Pauline, in New Yorker, 3 October 1970. Perkins, Victor, ‘‘The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,’’ in Movie Reader, edited by Ian Cameron, New York, 1972. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Circle of Pain: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1973. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘Rebel without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1974. Lardinois, J. M., in Apec-Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), no. 1, 1975. McVay, D., in Films and Filming (London), August 1977. Pedersen, B. T., ‘‘Nicholas Ray, nattens diktare,’’ in Chaplin (Stock- holm), vol. 21, no. 6, 1979. Thomson, D., in Take One (Montreal), no. 4, 1979. Cinema (Bucharest), March 1979. Fox, Terry, ‘‘Nicholas Ray, Without a Cause,’’ in Village Voice (New York), 9 July 1979. Boyero, C., in Casablanca (Madrid), May 1981. Bíró, G., in Filmkultura (Budapest), January-February 1982. Nielsen, Ray, ‘‘Corey Allen in Rebel Without a Cause,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 216, June 1993. Smith, J., ‘‘The Sound Track,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 45, March/April 1994. Beller, J.L., ‘‘The Radical Imagination in American Film,’’ in Crea- tive Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1994. Village Voice (New York), 2 May 1995. Simmons, Jerrold, ‘‘The Censoring of Rebel Without a Cause,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 23, no. 2, Summer 1995. Glatzer, Richard, ‘‘Daddy Cool,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 8, August 1995. Valley, Richard, ‘‘Character Actress: Ann Doran,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock, New Jersey), no. 17, Winter 1995. Lilley, Jessie, ‘‘Night Rebel: Jack Grinnage,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock, New Jersey), no. 17, Winter 1995. RED RIVER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1004 Braudy, L, ‘‘’No Body’s Perfect’: Method Acting and 50s Culture,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1996. Thomson, D., ‘‘Ten Films That Showed Hollywood How to Live,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 8, July 1997. Paulin, S.D., ‘‘Unheard Sexualities? Queer Theory and the Soundtrack,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 17, no. 2, 1997. *** In an overheated moment part-way through Laslo Benedek’s 1953 film The Wild One, Johnny (Marlon Brando) responds to the question ‘‘What are you rebelling against?’’ with ‘‘Watcha got?’’ That film detailed the restless rebellion of two motorcycle gangs, one bent on havoc, the other on less violent forms of social rebellion, and in Johnny lay the seed of many a Hollywood rebel, the pose of many an aspiring Hollywood actor, and the essence of a new breed of teenager. The following year, two films were released that immediately secured a position for their star as spokesperson for and icon of America’s frustrated youth. In both East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause James Dean embodied a restless youngster unable to cope with his future because of the insecurity of the present and the failings of his parents. Unlike Johnny, his anger was still internalized, waiting for the moment of explosion. As director Nicolas Ray said: ‘‘When you first see Jimmy in his red jacket against his black Merc, it’s not just a pose. It’s a warning. It’s a sign.’’ Ever in sympathy with the outsider, Ray fashioned a modern Romeo and Juliet story, a romance set among teenagers seeking satisfaction outside the traditional systems, misunderstood by their parents, misunderstanding and mistrusting of their parents’ values. Soon America would explode with the sound of rock ‘n roll, and teens would find a form of social rebellion that was non-violent but nonetheless highly charged. Ray caught both the immediate and timeless qualities of frustrated adolescence. A plea for understanding of the day’s younger generation, Rebel Without a Cause focused on three youngsters: Plato, whose divorced parents had abandoned him; Judy, who felt her father had withdrawn his love; and Jim, the offspring of a domineering mother and henpecked father. Disenchanted with their own families, these three alienated individuals sought a new sense of family, Plato and Judy looking to Jim as the head of the new unit. Unlike many of the teen rebel films which followed, Rebel placed a blame on the parents rather than the teens; teens were unbalanced by parents rather than the reverse. The main action of the film is compressed into one day, a day in which Jim moves from confusion to a possible sense of clarity, from wanting to be a man to the beginning stages of becoming one. After going through the various initiation rights into manhood—knife fight, chicken run, girlfriend, homosexual advance, drinking, etc.—Jim begins to realize that perhaps responsibility for his life rests within himself. The end of the film, in which he asserts independence and self-determination rings slightly optimistic and therefore false, mak- ing the spectator wonder whether Jim has been liberated or tamed. If Jim-as-a-rebel refers to his status at the beginning of the film, what is his status after Plato’s death? In this, his first film in Cinemascope, Nicholas Ray signalled his reputation as the American master in the format. Having studied on a Frank Lloyd Wright scholarship, Ray had a clearly defined sense of spatial relations, an ability which made much of his film noir work especially charged. In his Cinemascope features he developed an aesthetic of the horizontal which, particularly in Rebel Without a Cause, lent a sensuality to the images of alienation. If this feeling pervaded exteriors, a sense of claustrophobia permeated the spatial tensions of the cluttered interiors. Ray is also just beginning his metaphorical use of color in this film. Originally begun in black and white, Rebel was changed to color while in production, and Ray began to code his characters through changes in costume. Among the obvious examples are Plato’s wear- ing of one black and one red sock, signalling his confusion, Jim’s move from neutral browns to his bright red jacket, Judy’s move from red to soft pink. Ray’s ability to elicit strong performances is a key to the successes of his best films. Having trained as an actor and having come to film through a friendship and apprenticeship with Elia Kazan, he was particularly attuned to the problems and the practices of performance. Previously he had worked in close collaboration with Humphrey Bogart for the actor’s production company (Santana Films) on both Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place, and on Rebel Without a Cause he included Dean in the decisions of production. As actor Jim Backus wrote in his autobiography, Dean was practically the co-director of Rebel. Ray and Dean were so compatible that they had planned to collaborate on a second project on which Dean would serve as both actor and producer while Ray continued to direct (a project that was never realized because of Dean’s death). Ray was later to establish that relationship with James Mason on Bigger Than Life. Like Nick Romano in Knock on Any Door and Bowie in They Live By Night, Jim Stark is a misunderstood teenager seeking a better deal before it is too late. His gestures are those of alienation and pressur- ized anxiety, his overheated condition and need to cool down or explode best visualized by the scene in which he sensually presses a cold bottle of milk to his cheek. As much as any, that image became both a warning and a prediction. —Doug Tomlinson THE RED AND THE WHITE See CSILLAGOSAK, KATONAK RED PSALM See MEG KER A NEP RED RIVER USA, 1948 Director: Howard Hawks Production: Monterey Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 125 minutes, some sources list 133 minutes. Released 1948. RED RIVERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1005 Red River Filmed in 85 days. An extract of the film is featured in The Last Picture Show directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Producers: Charles K. Feldman with Howard Hawks; screenplay: Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, from the story ‘‘The Chisholm Trail’’ by Borden Chase; photography: Russell Harlan; editor: Christian Nyby; sound: Richard de Weese and Vinton Vernon; art director: John Datu Arensma; musical director: Dimitri Tiomkin; special effects: Donald Stewart and Allan Thompson. Cast: John Wayne (Thomas Dunson); Montgomery Clift (Matthew Garth); Joanne Dru (Tess Millay); Walter Brennan (Groot Nadine); Coleen Gray (Fen); John Ireland (Cherry Valence); Noah Beery, Jr. (Buster); Harry Carey, Jr. (Dan Latimer); Mickey Kuhn (Matt as an infant); Paul Fix (Teeler); Hank Worden (Slim); Ivan Parry (Bunk Kenneally); Hal Taliaferro (Old Leather); Paul Fierro (Fernandez); Billie Self (Cowboy); Ray Hyke (Walt Jergens); Dan White (Laredo); Tom Tyler (Cowboy); Glenn Strange (Naylor); Lane Chandler (Colo- nel); Joe Dominguez (Mexican guard); Shelley Winters (Girl in wagon train). Publications Books: Bogdanovitch, Peter, The Cinema of Howard Hawks, New York, 1962. Missiaen, Jean-Claude, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1966. Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks, New York, 1968; revised edition, 1981. Ricci, Mark, Boris Zmijewsky, and Steve Zmijewsky, The Films of John Wayne, New York, 1970; revised edition, as The Complete Films of John Wayne, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1983. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema 2, Berkeley, 1971. Gili, Jean A., Howard Hawks, Paris, 1971. Cameron, Ian, editor, Movie Reader, London, 1972. McBride, Joseph, editor, Focus on Howard Hawks, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975. Willis, D. C., The Films of Howard Hawks, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1975. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Western Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. LaGuardia, Robert, Monty: A Biography of Montgomery Clift, New York, 1977. RED RIVER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1006 Bosworth, Patricia, Montgomery Clift: A Biography, New York, 1978. Murphy, Kathleen A., Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Eyles, Allen, John Wayne, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1979. O’Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson, American History/ American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, New York, 1979. Ciment, Michael, Les Conquérants d’un nouveau monde: Essais sur le cinéma américain, Paris, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Kass, Judith, The Films of Montgomery Clift, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1981. McBridge, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks, Berkeley, 1982. Mast, Gerald, Howard Hawks, Storyteller, New York, 1982. Poague, Leland, Howard Hawks, Boston, 1982. Simsolo, No?l, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1984. Kieskalt, Charles John, The Official John Wayne Reference Book, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. Shepherd, Donald, and others, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne, London, 1985. Branson, Clark, Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study, Los Angeles, 1987. Lepper, David, John Wayne, London, 1987. Buscombe, Ed, editor, BFI Companion to the Western, London, 1988. Levy, Emanuel, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1988. Riggin, Judith M., John Wayne: A Bio-Bibliography, New York, 1992. Fagen, Herb, Duke, We’re Glad We Knew You: John Wayne’s Friends and Colleagues Remember His Remarkable Life, New York, 1996. Hillier, Jim, Howard Hawks: American Artist, Champaign, Illi- nois, 1997. McCarthy, Todd, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, New York, 1997. Roberts, Randy, John Wayne: American, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1997. Articles: Variety (New York), 14 July 1948. New York Times, 1 October 1948 New Yorker, 9 October 1948. Perez, Michel, ‘‘Howard Hawks et le western,’’ in Présence du Cinéma (Paris), July-September 1959. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘The World of Howard Hawks,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July and August 1962. ‘‘Hawks Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1963. Roman, Robert, ‘‘Montgomery Clift,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1966. Austen, David, ‘‘Gunplay and Horses,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October 1968. Brode, Douglas, in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1968. Hall, Dennis John, ‘‘Tall in the Saddle,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Goodwin, Michael, and Naomi Wise, ‘‘An Interview with Howard Hawks,’’ in Take One (Montreal), November-December 1971. ‘‘Hawks Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), May-June 1973. McBridge, Jim,’’Hawks Talks: New Anecdotes from the Old Mas- ter,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1974. Tiroiu, A., in Cinema (Bucharest), September 1974. Belton, J., in Movietone News (Seattle), 11 October 1976. Bourget, Jean-Loup, ‘‘Hawks et le mythe de l’ouest américain,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1977. Thomson, D., ‘‘All Along the River,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1976–77. Sklar, Robert, ‘‘Red River: Empire to the West,’’ in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1978. Ramirez Berg, Charles, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 14 February 1979. Reeder, R., et al., ‘‘Conflict of Interpretations: A Special Section on Red River by Howard Hawks,’’ in Ciné-Tracts (Montreal), Spring 1980. Marias, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), July-August 1981. Lippe, R., ‘‘Montgomery Clift: A Critical Disturbance,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Summer 1989. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 494, September 1995. O’Brien, Stella Ruzycki, ‘‘Leaving Behind The Chisholm Trail for Red River: Or Refiguring the Female in the Western Film Epic,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 24, no. 2, April 1996. Aachen, G., in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 23, 1996. Premiere (Boulder, Colorado), vol. 11, no. 5, January 1998. *** Red River is a film about a cattle drive. To depict this story of Texas cattlemen driving thousands of cattle across thousands of miles northward to Kansas, Howard Hawks, the film’s director, in effect recreated that original task to make the film. In both 1865, when the narrative was set, and 1946, when the film was shot, the epic task confronting a group of men was that of moving all those animals across all that space. The epic task is mirrored by the film’s vast, epic shots of men, cattle, sky, and space. The epic story is both a view of American history and a view of the American civilization as a successor to those of the past. Set just after the Civil War, the film’s journey reaffirms and re-establishes the oneness of the American nation and the oneness of the American continent. The journey to bring Texas beef to the north reveals the conquest of space and distance to produce one whole nation. But this journey has a relation to Homeric epic as well as to American history, for, like the Odyssey, the film chronicles a vast and epic task in which the threatened dangers are external (in Red River, the threat is from Indian attack and cattle rustlers) but the real dangers are internal (in the will, the judgment, and the dedication of the travellers themselves, and in the tension between the leader and his followers). In converting a sprawling serialized story by Borden Chase into his own taut film, Hawks chose a metaphoric title, Red River, which has little specific meaning in the story (crossing the Red River signifies the departure from the familiar homeland and the journey into the unknown) but which has obvious Biblical parallels to the epic journey of the Israelites in ‘‘Exodus.’’ Hawks anchors these epic and metaphoric suggestions with a sensitive psychological study of the journey’s two leaders, Thomas Dunson, the older man who founded the cattle spread in 1851, and Matthew Garth, his adopted son. In the role of Dunson, Hawks cast John Wayne, giving Wayne the kind of role that became indistinguishable from his own persona for three decades—tough, hard, absolutely committed to accomplishing the task before him no matter what the cost, old but not too old to get THE RED SHOESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1007 a tough job done, bull-headed but bound by personal codes of duty, honor, and morality. Opposite Wayne, Hawks cast the young Mont- gomery Clift in his first film role. The contrast between the sensitive ‘‘soft,’’ almost beautifully handsome Clift and the hard, determined, indomitable Wayne not only provides the essential psychological contrast required for the film’s narrative but also provides two brilliant and brilliantly contrasted acting styles for the film’s dramatic tension. In the film’s narrative, the more supple leader, Garth, replaces the unbending Dunson when the inflexible older man’s decisions threaten the success of the enterprise. Dunson vows to take revenge on Garth for this ouster, and the climax of the film, after Garth has successfully delivered the cattle to market, promises a gun battle between the vengeful Dunson and his own spiritual son. In what has become the most controversial issue about the film, that gun battle never takes place. While some see Hawks’s avoidance of the climactic duel as some kind of pandering to Hollywood taste. Hawks has carefully built into his narrative pattern the terms that guarantee that a man with Dunson’s sense of honor and morality could never kill a man who does not intend to kill him first. Matthew Garth demonstrates he could never kill his ‘‘father,’’ and Dunson, despite his previous verbal threats and his unswerving commitment to his word, could never kill the ‘‘son’’ who loves him. As is typical of a Hawks film, beneath the superficial talk the two men love one another, and they demonstrate that love by what they do rather than what they say. —Gerald Mast THE RED SHOES UK, 1948 Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Production: The Archers; Technicolor; running time: 136 minutes; length: 12,209 feet. Released July 1948. Producers: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; screenplay: Emeric Pressburger; photography: Jack Cardiff; editor: Reginald Mills; production designer: Hein Heckroth; art director: Arthur Lawson; choreography: Robert Helpmann; music: Brian Easdale, performed by Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Tho- mas Beecham. Cast: Marius Goring (Julian Craster); Jean Short (Terry); Gordon Littman (Ike); Julia Lang (A Balletomane); Bill Shine (Her Mate); Leonide Massine (Ljubov); Anton Walbrook (Boris Lermontov); Austin Trevor (Professor Palmer); Eric Berry (Dimitri); Irene Browne (Lady Neston); Moira Shearer (Victoria Page); Ludmilla Tcherina (Boronskaja); Robert Helpmann (Ivan Boleslawsky); Albert Basserman (Ratov). Awards: Oscars for Best Color Art Direction and Best Drama Music Score, 1948. Publications Books: Franks, A. H., Ballet for Film and Television, London, 1950. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London, 1970. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of the British Cinema, London, 1978. Christie, Ian, editor, Powell, Pressburger, and Others, London, 1978. Cosandey, Roland, editor, Retrospective: Powell and Pressburger, Locarno, 1982. Gottler, Fritz, and others, Living Cinema: Powell and Pressburger, Munich, 1982. Christie, Ian Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, 1985, 1994. Martini, Emanuela, editor, Powell and Pressburger, Bergamo, 1986. Powell, Michael, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography, London, 1986. Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel: British Cinema and Society 1939–48, London, 1989. Cintra Ferreira, Manuel, Michael Powell, Lisbon, 1992. MacDonald, Kevin, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, London, 1994. Howard, James, Michael Powell, London, 1996. Salwolke, Scott, Films of Michael Powell and the Archers, Lanham, Maryland, 1997. Articles: Williamson, Andrew, ‘‘Filming Red Shoes,’’ in The Dancing Times (London), January 1948. Kine Weekly (London), 22 July 1948. Lejeune, C. A., in Observer (London), 25 July 1948. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1948. Variety (New York), 4 August 1948. Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1948. New York Times, 23 October 1948. Lightman, Herb, in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), March 1949. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Michael Powell: Myths and Supermen,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. Everson, William K., ‘‘Michael Powell,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1980. Thomson, David, ‘‘The Films of Michael Powell: A Romantic Sensibility,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), Novem- ber 1980. Everson, William K., in MOMA Program Notes (New York), 29 November 1980. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Cinema of Enchantment: The Films of Michael Powell,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1981. Percival, John, in The Times (London), 21 July 1982. Anderson, Jack, in New York Times, 27 September 1984. Blanchet, C., in Cinema (Paris), November 1984. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), March 1985. Fraser, Peter, ‘‘The Musical Movie: Putting on the Red Shoes,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Spring 1987. THE RED SHOES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1008 The Red Shoes Benson, Sheila, in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1990. Holthof, M., ‘‘The Red Shoes,’’ in Sinema, no. 102, March/April 1991. Harris, W., ‘‘Revamp The Red Shoes?’’ in New York Times, vol. 143, section 2, 31 October 1993. Kelly, D., ‘‘Filling The Red Shoes,’’ Dance Magazine, vol. 67, November 1993. Ostlere, H., ‘‘Pursued by The Red Shoes,’’ in Dance Magazine, vol. 67, November 1993. Jacobs, Laura, ‘‘The Red Shoes Revisited: An Appreciation of the Balletomane’s Classic Film,’’ in Atlantic Monthly (Boston), Decem- ber 1993. Cohn, E., in Village Voice (New York), vol. 39, 4 January 1994. Backstein, K., ‘‘A Second Look: The Red Shoes,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. Kass, Sarah A., ‘‘Their Movies Were ‘Beautiful Fantasies,’’’ in The New York Times, vol. 144, section 2, H25, 16 April 1995. Elrick, Ted, ‘‘The Day the Earth Freeze-Framed,’’ in DGA Magazine (Los Angeles), vol. 20, no. 4, September-October 1995. Erens, Patricia, ‘‘A Childhood at the Cinema: Latency Fantasies, the Family Romance, and Juvenile Spectatorship,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 16, no. 4, October 1995. Reid, J.H., in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 31, 1997. Turner, G., ‘‘The Red Shoes: A Ballet for Camera,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 79, February 1998. *** The success of their previous collaborations, most notably A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, permitted Powell and Pressburger to make The Red Shoes, a ‘‘ballet’’ film, an ‘‘art’’ film whose commercial prospects were dim indeed. Powell describes the reaction of executives at an early screening: ‘‘They . . . left the theatre without a word because they thought they had lost their shirts. They couldn’t understand one word of it.’’ The Red Shoes went on to critical acclaim and, less predictably, to sustained popularity with the public. The lushness of its colour-drenched images and its passion- drenched depiction of the characters were not, in themselves, the factors that determined the initial appeal. It was the dancing, the very thing that had made those executives so leery of the film’s viability with something approaching mass audience. As so often happens to films that are deliriously received, The Red Shoes later fell subject to revisionist readings that dismissed its plot as RED SORGHUMFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1009 excessively melodramatic, its characters as absurdly overdrawn, even its depiction of the world of ballet as false. Although Powell and Pressburger have been canonized as filmmakers, and a number of their works subjected to the kind of analysis that is the warrant of seriousness, The Red Shoes has continued to be neglected, in the main, as an object of critical concern. The Red Shoes has suffered for its glamour and for its apparently simplistic, reductive tale of the beautiful ballerina torn between art and love. Yet it has been fre- quently revived and continues to exert its allure. One of the primary keys to the persistent audience appeal of The Red Shoes is precisely the persistence (and the complexity) with which the film depicts audience appeal. From the opening sequence— the rush for seats to an evening of ballet at Covent Garden, the detailed reactions of the music students, the balletomanes, the aspir- ing ballerina, the snobbish impresario—to the climax—a perform- ance of the ballet The Red Shoes in which the dead ballerina is represented by a spotlight, the film dramatizes a variety of responses to art, of connections to the performance of art. We find the range of our own experience as spectators echoed on the screen by the actors who play an array of dancers, musicians, and other creative members of a ballet troupe. Caught in the shifting points of view, we are given access to the expertise and the knowledge of those ‘‘inside’’ the world of ballet. The fervour of spectatorship, manifested by all the principal characters, is summed up in the obsessive gaze of the impresario, for whom art is a matter of life and death, a level of vision the film challenges us to meet. As we watch the ballet of The Red Shoes, staged with the illusionistic freedom afforded only by techniques of cinema, we are reminded of our privileged point-of-view as moviegoers. We also come to believe the phrase reiterated throughout the course of the film: ‘‘The music is all that matters. Nothing but the music.’’ It is music that goes beyond the banalities of plot and character, that liberates the film from its dramatic conventions. It is music as wordless, storyless sensation that finds its analogy is the film’s memorable images—the redhead in the long green dress climbing on interminable staircase on a hillside in the south of France, her precipitous descent down other staircases just before leaping to her death, the repeated gestures of the ballet in rehearsal and perform- ance, the images of eyes watching in ecstatic concentration. These hyperboles of gesture and attitude, sometimes condemned, are the best proof of its success in finding a place in the sound film for the close affinities of the mimetic discourses of ballet and of silent cinema. —Charles Affron RED SORGHUM (Hong gao liang) People’s Republic of China, 1988 Director: Zhang Yimou Production: Xi An Film Studio; color, 35mm; running time: 91 minutes. Filmed 1987; released 1988. Producer: Li Changqing; screenplay: Chen Jianyu, Zhu Wei, Mo Yen; photography: Gu Changwei; editor: Du Yuan; art director: Yang Gang; music director: Zhao Jiping. Cast: Gong Li (My Grandma); Jing Wen (My Grandpa); Liu Ji (Father, as child); Teng Rijun (Uncle Luohan); Ji Chunhua (Bandit); Qian Ming; Zhai Chunhua. Awards: Golden Bear Award, Berlin Film Festival, 1988; New York Film Festival Best Film Award, 1988. Publications Articles: Kauffmann, Stanley, ‘‘Red Sorghum’’ (review), in New Republic, 17 October 1988. Klawans, Stuart, ‘‘Zhang Yimou: Local Hero,’’ in Film Comment, September-October 1995. Ye, Tan, ‘‘From the Fifth to the Sixth Generation’’ (interview), in Film Quarterly, Winter 1999. *** When Red Sorghum was released in 1988, it attained immediate fame and success, both in its Chinese homeland and around the world. To the outside world, the film promised a rare view into a China just emerging from the protective isolationism that surrounded the Cul- tural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. To moviegoers inside the People’s Republic, Red Sorghum marked a new kind of cinema and the beginning of a new generation of filmmakers. Zhang Yimou, who directed Red Sorghum, was born in 1950, in the thick of the revolution. Like many others born into privileged families at that time, his higher education was factory labor, and his cultural entertainment consisted of government sponsored films and theatrical productions, which were usually simplistic, moralistic, and patriotic. Though Zhang was fascinated by film, and managed to buy his first camera while working in factories, he would be forever influenced by his disgust with the overtly propagandistic films of his youth. Later he would recall, ‘‘When we were in film school, we swore to each other we would never make films like that.’’ By 1982, the Beijing Film Academy, which had been closed during the Cultural Revolution, was reopened, and Zhang was part of the first post-Mao graduating class. It was the fifth class to ever graduate the Academy, giving Zhang and his classmates their sobri- quet, the ‘‘fifth generation’’ of Chinese filmmakers. The fifth genera- tion were not establishment filmmakers, but they gained international notice because of the moral complexity and gritty realism of their films. Adapted from a novel by Mo Yan, Red Sorghum was one of the first of this new breed of Chinese film. Set mostly in the 1920s, the film is told in flashbacks from the point of view of a man recalling his grandparents’ lives as they try, and finally fail, to protect their village winery from Japanese invaders. It is a lyrical film, which seems at times almost like an epic or folk tale, as it challenges repressive traditions such as the subjugation of women. Zhang, who was trained to be a cinematographer, has a sharp eye for the visual elements of his film and the color red—of the sorghum crop, the wine, the Chinese bridal dress, and blood—permeates the film. The red, red setting sun that ends the film might represent the flag of the Japanese conquerors, or simply the inevitable shortness of every human life. LOS REDES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1010 Red Sorghum Red Sorghum is a film of contradictions. Containing darkly comic elements, it is also a violent film; the villagers treat each other violently and the men treat women violently, but their violence pales compared to their treatment at the hands of the Japanese army. The reception of the film was itself contradictory. Director Zhang re- ceived ten thousand letters accusing him of treason when Red Sorghum was released, yet the movie houses showing the film in China were packed. A new generation of Chinese audiences were hungry for a film that expressed the moral ambiguity and the sense of chafing under authority that they themselves were beginning to feel. After the release of Red Sorghum, Chinese leader Den Xiaoping increased the repression of Chinese intellectuals. Where Red Sor- ghum had been an accepted film that brought international awards home to China, Zhang’s next films (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, for example) were banned in his own country, though they were popular around the world. In 1994, Zhang was forbidden to make films for five years. Red Sorghum was a breakthrough to a new kind of filmmaking in China. It was also a bridge between China and the world outside it, from which it had been largely cut off during the years of the Cultural Revolution. Later, as the government cracked down, and the fifth generation filmmakers outgrew their youthful rebelliousness, Chi- nese film stepped back under a more comfortable umbrella of popular propaganda. But, thanks to films like Red Sorghum, the world outside China would never be shut out in the same way again. —Tina Gianoulis LOS REDES (The Wave) Mexico, 1936 Directors: Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel Production: Secretaria de Educación Púlica, Mexico; black and white, 35mm; running time: 65 minutes. Released 1936. Filmed LOS REDESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1011 beginning 9 April 1934, in natural settings in Alvarado, Tlacotalpan, and the mouth of the Papaloapan River. Cost: 55,000 pesos. Producers: Carlos Chávez and Narciso Bassols; scenario: Agustín Velázquez Chávez and Paul Strand, adapted by Emilio Gómez Muriel, Fred Zinnemann, and Henwar Rodakiewicz; photography: Paul Strand; editors: Emilio Gómez Muriel with Gunther von Fritsch; sound: Roberto and Joselito Rodriguez; music: Silvestre Revueltas. Cast: Silvio Hernández (Miro); David Valle González (The packer); Rafael Hinojosa (The politician); Antonio Lara (El Zurdo); Miguel Figueroa; and native fishermen. Publications Books: Griffith, Richard, Fred Zinnemann, New York, 1958. Garcia Riera, Emilio, Historia documental del cine mexicano, Mex- ico City, 1969. Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph, The Years 1915–1946, and The Years 1950–1968, New York, 1971. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1971. Mora, Carl J., Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1980, Berkeley, 1982. Rausa, Giuseppe, Fred Zinnemann, Florence, 1985. Goldau, Antje, and others, Zinnemann, Munich, 1986. Zinnemann, Fred, A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography, New York, 1992. Nolletti Jr., Arthur, editor, The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives, Albany, New York, 1999. Articles: New York Times, 21 April 1937. New Yorker, 24 April 1937. Variety (New York), 28 April 1937. Belitt, B., ‘‘Camera Reconnoiters,’’ in Nation (New York), 20 November 1937. Chavez, Carlos, ‘‘Films by American Government: Mexico,’’ in Films, Summer 1940. Cine (Mexico City), November 1978. Gutierrez Heras, J., ‘‘La musica de Silvestre Revueltas en el cine,’’ in Dicine, no. 43, January 1992. Zinnemann, F., ‘‘Letter From Fred Zinnemann,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 2, 1994/1995. Roud, R., ‘‘Iz rezhisserskogo arkhiva,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 12, 1996. Horton, Robert, ‘‘Day of the Craftsman: Fred Zinnemann,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 5, September-October 1997. Neve, Brian, ‘‘A Past Master of His Craft: An Interview with Fred Zinnemann,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 23, no. 1, Win- ter 1997. *** A progenitor of the classical Mexican visual style, Los Redes is also one of the very few instances of genuine social criticism in the history of Mexican cinema. The fact that Los Redes was directed and photographed by foreigners is ironic as well as illustrative of a neo- colonial tendency in Mexican films. Los Redes was born out the collaboration of Paul Strand, a photographer from New York who had come to Mexico to do a book of photos on the country, and two Mexicans: Carlos Chávez, the noted composer who occupied a gov- ernment post at the time, and Narciso Bassols, a Marxist who was then the Secretary of Public Education. 1930–40 was the decade in which the social ideals of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) achieved their greatest artistic and political expression. Many of the important murals were painted during this period, which was also the time of the expropriation of foreign oil companies and extensive land distribution by President Lazaro Cardenas. Bassols and Chávez desired to partici- pate in this revolutionary process by financing films, which were to be ‘‘with the people for the people,’’ with government funds. In addition to Paul Strand, they hired a young Austrian, Fred Zinnemann (who later went on to a long distinguished career in Hollywood), to direct the film which was to portray life and struggle in a fishing village. Los Redes combines many of the elements which were afterward to make up the classical Mexican film style. The excellent photogra- phy focuses on the beauty of natural and famous forms: rolling masses of luminous clouds, swirling eddies of water, fishermen’s nets draped out on lines to dry, palm fronds against thatched huts, stoic native faces set off by white shirts or dark rebozos, their sinuous arms entwined with ropes. Both the images and the dialectical montage of the editing appear to be influenced by the work of Sergei Eisenstein, who had filmed the never-released Que Viva Mexico several years earlier. Equally important, however, must have been Paul Strand’s background in the National Film and Photo League, many of whose photographers went on to produce the extraordinary documentation of the depression in the United States under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. These radical influences from abroad fused with the evolutionary experience of Mexico to produce a work of penetrating social criticism. Incredibly exploited by the packer’s monopoly, the fisher- men attempt to form a union under the leadership of Miro, whose young son has died for lack of medicine. Miro is killed by the politician who has been paid by the packer, but the other fishermen continue the struggle. The film not only lays bare a situation of exploitation, it also criticizes religion, reformist politics, and anarchism by indicating that none of these provide as effective an answer as does organized resistance. The use of non-professional actors adds to the film’s realism, and the intelligent employment of montage and music keeps the actors from being overwhelmed by the demands made upon them. Although the film was an economic failure, critics both inside and outside Mexico have since perceived it to be an important work. Within Mexico, Los Redes and Que Viva Mexico are seen as the precursors of the style later made internationally known in the films of Emilio Fernández and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Out- side Mexico, several writers have stated that it may well have been a major influence on Italian neo-realism. Whatever its effects, Los Redes is an interesting example of socially committed art and a key film in the history of Mexican cinema. —John Mraz RèGLE DU JEU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1012 RèGLE DU JEU (Rules of the Game) France, 1939 Director: Jean Renoir Production: La Nouvelle Edition Fran?aise; black and white, 35mm; running time: 85 minutes, restored version is 110 minutes; length: restored version is 10,080 feet. Released 7 July 1939, Paris. Re- released 1949 in Great Britain, and 1950 in New York. Restored to original form and released at 1959 Venice Film Festival. Filmed February through the Spring of 1939, in the Chateau de le Ferté-Saint- Aubin and at La Motte-Beuvron, Aubigny; interiors shot at the Billancourt Studios, Joinville. Cost: 5,000,000 F. Producer: Claude Renoir; screenplay: Jean Renoir with Camille Fran?ois and Carl Koch; assistant directors: André Zwobada and Henri Cartier-Bresson; photography: Jean Bachelet; editor: Marguerite Houlet-Renoir; sound engineer: Joseph de Bretagne; production designer: Eugène Lourié; assistant designer: Max Douy; music director: Roger Desormières; costume designer: Coco Chanel. Cast: Marcel Dalio (Robert de la Chesnaye); Nora Grégor (Christine de la Chesnaye); Roland Toutain (André Jurieu); Jean Renoir (Oc- tave); Mila Parély (Geneviève de Marrast); Paulette Dubost (Lisette); Gaston Modot (Schumacher); Julien Carette (Marceau); Anne Mayen (Jackie); Pierre Nay (Saint-Auben); Pierre Magnier (The General); Odette Talazac (Charlotte); Roger Forster (The homosexual); Rich- ard Francouer (La Bruyère); Claire Gérard (Madame de la Bruyère); Tony Corteggiani (Berthelin); Nicolas Amato (The South American); Eddy Debray (Corneille); Lisa Elina (Radio announcer); André Zwobada (Engineer); Léon Larive (Chef); Célestin (Kitchen servant); Jenny Helia (Serving girl); Henri Cartier-Bresson (English servant); Lise Elina (Female radio announcer); André Zwobada (Engineer at the Caudron); Camille Fran?ois (Radio announcer); friends of Jean Renoir as guests in the shooting party; local villagers as the beaters. Publications Script: Renoir, Jean, Camille Fran?ois, and Carl Koch, La Règle du jeu, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1965; as The Rules of the Game, New York, 1969. Books: Sadoul, Georges, French Film, London, 1953. Cauliez, Armand-Jean, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1962. Chadere, Bernard, Jean Renoir, Lyons, 1962. Analyses des films de Jean Renoir, Paris, 1966. Simon, John, Private Screenings, New York, 1967. Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema, New York, 1968. Cowie, Peter, 70 Years of Cinema, New York, 1969. Poulle, Fran?ois, Renoir 1938, Paris, 1969. Leprohon, Pierre, Jean Renoir, New York, 1971. Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir: The World of his Films, New York 1972. Bazin, André, Jean Renoir, edited by Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1973, 1992. Burch, No?l, Theory of Film Practice, New York, 1973. Mast, Gerald, Filmguide to The Rules of the Game, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Solomon, Stanley, The Classic Cinema, New York, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir, Berkeley, 1974. Renoir, Jean, My Life and My Films, New York, 1974, 1991. Gilliatt, Penelope, Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, New York, 1975. Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Sesonske, Alexander, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924–1939, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1980. Gauteur, Claude, Jean Renoir: Oeuvres de cinéma inédites, Paris, 1981. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, Le Texte divisé: Essai sur l’écriture filmique, Paris, 1981. McBride, Joseph, editor, Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute Seminars on Motion Pictures and Television, vol- ume 2, Los Angeles, 1983. Renoir, Jean, Lettres d’Amérique, edited by Dido Renoir and Alexan- der Sesonske, Paris, 1984. Serceau, Daniel, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1985. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, editors, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York, 1985. Bertin, Celia, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1986. Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Prince- ton, 1986. Vincendeau, Ginette, and Keith Reader, La Vie est à nous: French Cinema of the Popular Front 1935–1938, London, 1986. Viry-Babel, Roger, Jean Renoir: Le Jeu et la règle, Paris, 1986. Guislain, Pierre, La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1990. Bergan, Ronald, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, Woodstock, 1994. Cavagnac, Guy, Jean Renoir: le désir du monde, Paris, 1994. O’Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir, New York, 2000. Articles: Lo Duca, Giuseppe, ‘‘Il cinema e lo Stato: inter-vista con Fran?oise Rosay e Jean Renoir,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 25 March 1939. Plant, Richard, ‘‘Jean Renoir,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), June 1939. Variety (New York), 30 August 1939. Lambert, Gavin, ‘‘French Cinema: The New Pessismism,’’ in Se- quence (London), Summer 1948. Menard, Louis, in Temps Modernes (Paris), no. 43, 1949. Lambert, Gavin, ‘‘A Last Look Round,’’ in Sequence (London), no.14, 1952. ‘‘Renoir Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1952. Renoir, Jean, ‘‘Personal Note,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), April- June 1952. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘The Renaissance of the French Cinema—Feyder, Renoir, Duvivier, Carné,’’ in Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot, New York, 1959. Brunelin, André G., ‘‘Histoire d’une malédiction,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), February 1960. Dyer, Peter John, ‘‘Renoir and Realism,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1960. RèGLE DU JEUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1013 Règle du jeu Corbin, Louise, in Films in Review (New York), 26 January 1951. New York Times, 19 January 1961. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 26 January 1961. Whitehall, Richard, in Films and Filming (London), November 1961 and November 1962. Marcorelles, Louis, ‘‘Conversation with Jean Renoir,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1962. Russell, Lee, and Peter Wollen, ‘‘Jean Renoir,’’ in New Left Review (London), May-June 1964. Esnault, Philippe, ‘‘Le Jeu de la verité,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1965. ‘‘Renoir, cinéaste de notre temps, à coeur ouvert,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), May 1967 and June 1967. Joly, J., ‘‘Between Theatre and Life: Jean Renoir and The Rules of the Game,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1967–68. Grelier, Robert, ‘‘Dialogue avec une salle, in Cinéma (Paris), March 1968. Budgen, Suzanne, ‘‘Some Notes on the Sources of La règle du jeu,’’ in Take One (Montreal), July-August 1968. Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 23 August 1969 and 20 Septem- ber 1969. Fofi, Goffredo, ‘‘The Cinema of the Popular Front in France, (1934–38),’’ in Screen (London), Winter 1972–73. Mary, A., ‘‘L’Analyse du film,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), Decem- ber 1972. Roud, Richard, in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, New York, 1973. Litle, Michael, ‘‘Sound Track: Rules of the Game,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1973. Wood Jr, George A., ‘‘Game Theory and The Rules of the Game,” in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1973. Gauteur, Claude, ‘‘La règle du jeu et la critique en 1939,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), March 1974. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Renoir: Impressions at Twilight,’’ in Village Voice (New York), 6 and 12 September 1974. Sitney, P. Adams, ‘‘Bergman et Renoir: A propos des Sourires d’une noit d’été,’’ in Cinema (New York), 1975. Jehle, W., in Cinema (Zurich), no. 4, 1975. Lewis, Marshall, ‘‘A Masterpiece on 8th Street,’’ in The Essential Cinema, edited by P. Adams Sitney, New York, 1975. Boost, C., ‘‘La règle du jeu: Renoir’s spelregel: de leugen,’’ in Skoop (Wageningen), March 1976. RèGLE DU JEU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1014 Haakman, A., ‘‘Hoe moet een acteur geregisseerd worden?. . . ,’’ in Skoop (Wageningen), March 1976. Lesage, Julia, ‘‘S/Z and Rules of the Game,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago) 30 December 1976. Perebinossoff, P. R., ‘‘Theatricals in Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Winter 1977. Roy, J., in Cinéma (Paris), June 1978. Strebel, Elizabeth Grottle, ‘‘Jean Renoir and the Popular Front,’’ in Feature Films as History, edited by K. R. M. Short, London, 1981. Renoir, Jean, ‘‘Presentacion de La regla del juego,’’ in Contracampo (Madrid), March 1982. Marias, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), April 1982. ‘‘Règle du jeu Issue’’ of Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Summer 1982. Snyder, J., ‘‘Film and Classical Genre . . . : Rules for Interpreting Rules of the Game,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterley (Salisbury, Maryland), July 1982. Gauteur, Claude in Positif (Paris), July-August 1982. Rafferty, T., ‘‘The Essence of the Landscape,’’ in New Yorker, 25 June 1990. Tifft, S., ‘‘Drole de Guerre: Renoir, Farce, and the Fall of France,’’ in Representations (Berkeley), Spring 1992. Bramkamp, R., and H.-J. Kapp, ‘‘Dialog ueber La règle du jeu von Jean Renoir,’’ in Filmwaerts (Hannover), June 1993. Brisseau, Jean-Claude, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 482, July- August 1994. Legrand, Gérard, and Alain Masson, and B. Asscher, ‘‘Homage à Jean Renoir,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 401–402, July-August 1994. Smith, Gavin, ‘‘A Man of Excess: Paul Schrader on Jean Renoir,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 1, January 1995. Buchsbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘’My Nationality is Cinematography’: Renoir and the National Question,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth), no. 12–13, 1996. Bergstrom, J., ‘‘Jean Renoir’s Return to France,’’ in Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 3, 1996. Reader, K., in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, September 1996. Bates, Robin, ‘‘Audiences on the Verge of a Fascist Breakdown: Male Anxieties and Late 1930s French Film,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 3, Spring 1997. Mayer, H., ‘‘Figaro 1939,’’ in Trafic (Paris), no. 24, Winter 1997. *** Detested when it first appeared (for satirizing the French ruling class on the brink of World War II), almost destroyed by brutal cutting, restored in 1959 to virtually its original form, La règle du jeu is now universally acknowledged as a masterpiece and perhaps Renoir’s supreme achievement. In the four international critics polls organized every ten years (since 1952) by Sight and Sound, only two films have been constant: one is Battleship Potemkin, and the other is La règle du jeu. And in the 1982 poll La règle du jeu had climbed to second place. Its extreme complexity (it seems, after more than 20 viewings, one of the cinema’s few truly inexhaustible films) makes it peculiarly difficult to write about briefly; the following attempt will indicate major lines of interest: Sources. The richness of the film is partly attributable to the multiplicity of its sources and influences (all, be it said, totally assimilated: there is no question here of an undigested eclecticism). It seems very consciously (though never pretentiously) the product of the vast and complex cultural tradition, with close affinities with the other arts, especially painting, theatre and music. If it evokes impres- sionist painting less directly than certain other Renoir films (for example Partie de campagne or French Can-Can), it is strikingly faithful to the spirit of impressionism, the desire to portray life-as- flux rather than as a collection of discrete objects or figures. The influence of theatre is much more obvious, since it directly affects the acting style, which relates to a tradition of French boulevard comedy. Renoir specifically refers to Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne as a source (indeed, it was to be the title of the film at an early stage of its evolution) and to Beaumarchais (the film is prefaced by a quotation from The Marriage of Figaro). This last points us directly to music, and especially to Mozart, whose music opens and closes the film, the ‘‘overture’’ (in fact the first of the ‘‘3 German Dances’’ K.605) accompanying the Beaumarchais quotation. This is perhaps the most Mozartian of all films: it constantly evokes Bruno Walter’s remark (in a celebrated rehearsal record of a Mozart symphony), ‘‘The expres- sion changes in every bar.’’ Method. Every frame of La règle du jeu seems dominated by Renoir’s personality; yet the most appealing facets of that personality are generosity, openness, responsiveness. As a result, La règle is at once the auteur film par excellence and a work of co-operation and active participation. In Renoir’s words, ‘‘of all the films I have made, this one is probably the most improvised. We worked out the script and decided on the places we were going to shoot as we went along. . . .’’ It is clear that much of the film’s complexity derives from its improvisatory, co-operative nature. Renoir cast himself as Octave (a role originally intended for his older brother Pierre), and developed Octave’s relationship with Christine, because of his own pleasure in the company of Nora Grégor; the role of Geneviève was greatly extended (originally, she was to have left the chateau after the hunt) because of Renoir’s appreciation of the talent of Mila Parély; the entire sub-plot involving the servants was similarly elaborated during shooting, partly because of Renoir’s delight in Carette’s characterization. Stylistics. The film marks the furthest elaboration of certain stylistic traits developed by Renoir since his silent films: the use of off-screen space (see N?el Burch’s seminal account of Nana in Theory of Film Practice); the mobile camera, always at the service of the action and the actors yet unusually free in its movements, continuously tracking, panning, re-framing; the fondness for the group shot, in which several characters (sometimes several diverse but simultaneous actions) are linked; depth of field, enabling the staging of simultaneous foreground and background actions, which often operate like counterpoint in music; the re-thinking of ‘‘compo- sition’’ in terms of time and movement (of the camera, of the actors) rather than static images; the constant transgressing of the boundaries of the frame, which actors enter and exit from during shots. There are various consequences of this practice: 1) Renoir’s ‘‘realism’’ (a word we should use very carefully in reference to so stylized a film)—the sense of life continuing beyond the borders of the frame, as if the camera were selecting, more or less arbitrarily, a mere portion of a continuous ‘‘real’’ world. 2) A drastic modification of the habits of REPULSIONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1015 identification generally encouraged by mainstream cinema. Close- ups and point-of-view shots are rare (though Renoir does not hesitate to use them when he feels them to be dramatically appropriate— interestingly, such usages are almost always linked to Christine). The continual reframings and entrances/exits ensure that the spectator’s gaze is constantly being transferred from character to character, action to action. If Christine is gradually defined as the film’s central figure, this is never at the expense of other characters, and she never becomes our sole object of identification. 3) The style of the film also assumes a metaphysical dimension, the apprehension of life-as-flux. The quotation from Lavoisier that Renoir applied to his father is apt for him too: ‘‘In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. . . .’’ Thematics. La règle du jeu defies reduction to any single statement of ‘‘meaning.’’ As with any great work of art, its thematic dimension is inextricably involved with its stylistics. Renoir’s own statements about the film indicate the complexity of attitude it embodies: on the one hand, ‘‘the story attacks the very structure of our society’’; on the other, ‘‘I wish I could live in such a society—that would be wonder- ful.’’ People repeatedly quote Octave’s line. ‘‘Everyone has his reasons,’’ as if it summed up the film (and Renoir), reducing its attitude to a simple, all-embracing generosity; they ignore the words that introduce it: ‘‘. . . there’s one thing that is terrible, and that is that everyone has his reasons.’’ As to the ‘‘rules’’ of the title, the attitude is again highly complex. On the one hand, the film clearly recognizes the need for order, for some form of ‘‘regulation’’; on the other, the culminating catastrophe is precipitated by the application of opposed sets of rules by two characters (who happen to be husband and wife): Schumacher, who believes in punishing promiscuity with death, and Lisette, who believes in sexual game-playing but has rigid notions of propriety in questions of age and income. Not surprisingly, the film plays on unresolved (perhaps, within our culture, unresolvable) tensions and paradoxes: the Marquis ‘‘doesn’t want fences’’ (restric- tions), but also ‘‘doesn’t want rabbits’’ (total freedom). Few films have treated the issue of sexual morality (fidelity, monogamy, free- dom) with such openness: a film about people who go too far, or a film about people who don’t go far enough? —Robin Wood REISE DER HOFFNUNG See JOURNEY OF HOPE REPENTANCE See POKAIANIE A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND THE GUESTS See O SLAVNOSTI A HOSTECH REPULSION UK, 1965 Director: Roman Polanski Production: Compton-Tekli; black and white; running time: 104 minutes; length: 9,360 feet. Released June 1965. Producer: Gene Gutowski; associate producers: Robert Sterne, Sam Wayneberg; screenplay: Roman Polanski, Gerard Brach; as- sistant director: Ted Sturgis; photography: Gilbert Taylor; editor: Alistair McIntyre; sound: Stephen Dalby; art director: Seamus Flannery; music: Chico Hamilton. Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Carol); Yvonne Furneaux (Helen); John Fraser (Colin); Ian Hendry (Michael); Patrick Wymark (The Land- lord); Valerie Taylor (Mme Denise); Helen Fraser (Bridget); Renee Houston (Miss Balch); James Villiers (John); Hugh Futcher (Reggie); Mike Pratt (Workman); Monica Merlin (Mrs. Rendlesham); Imogen Graham (Manicurist). Publications Script: Polanski, Roman, and Gerard Brach, Repulsion, in Three Films by Roman Polanski, London, 1975. Books: Butler, Ivan, The Cinema of Roman Polanski, New York, 1970. Kane, Pascal, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1970. Belmans, Jacques, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1971. Durgnat, Raymond, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema, London, 1974. Bisplinghoff, Gretchen, and Virginia Wexman, Roman Polanski: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Kiernan, Thomas, The Roman Polanski Story, New York, 1980. Leaming, Barbara, Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biogra- phy, New York, 1981; as Polanski: His Life and Films, Lon- don, 1982. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981. Fisher, Jens Malte, Filmwissenschaft—Filmgeschichte: Studien zu Welles, Hitchcock, Polanski, Pasolini, and Max Steiner, Tübingen, 1983. Polanski, Roman, Roman, London, 1984. Dokumentation: Polanski und Skolimowski; Das Absurde im Film, Zurich, 1985. Wexman, Virginia Wright, Roman Polanski, Boston, 1985. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and others, Roman Polanski, Munich, 1986. REPULSION FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1016 Repulsion Avron, Dominique, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1987. Bruno, Edoardo, Roman Polanski, Rome, 1993. Parker, John, Polanski, London, 1993. Stachówna, Grazyna, Roman Pola’nski I jego filmy, Warsaw, 1994. Cappabianca, Alessandro, Roman Polanski, Recco, 1997. Articles: Brach, Gerard, in Cinéma (Paris), February 1965. Dyer, Peter John, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1965. Variety (New York), 16 June 1965. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1965. Barr, Charles, and Peter von Bagh, in Movie (London), Autumn 1965. Delahaye, Michael, and J. A. Fieschi, ‘‘Paysage d’un cerveau: Entretien avec Roman Polanski,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1966. Caen, Michel, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1966. Johnson, Albert, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1966. McArthur, Colin, ‘‘Polanski,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1968–69. Ross, T. J., ‘‘Roman Polanski, Repulsion, and the New Mythology,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1968–69. Reisner, Joel, and Bruce Kane, ‘‘An Interview with Roman Polanski,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), no. 2, 1969. Ciment, Michel, and others ‘‘Entretien avec Roman Polanski,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1969. Leach, J., ‘‘Notes on Polanski’s Cinema of Cruelty,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 2, no. 1, 1978. Amiel, M., and others, ‘‘L’Univers de Roman Polanski,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), February 1980. Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 5, 1982. Corfman, S., ‘‘Polanski’s Repulsion and the Subject of Self,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 10, no. 1, 1989. Lucas, Tim, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 33, 1996. Taubin, A., ‘‘Sex on the Brain,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 42, 23 September 1997. Biodrowski, S., ‘‘Reissues, Revivals, and Restorations: Repulsion and Dracula,’’ in Cinefantastique (Forest Park), vol. 29, no. 11, 1998. *** RESERVOIR DOGSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1017 In the early 1960s Roman Polanski’s producer, seeking financial backing for what was to be that director’s second feature film and his first in the English language, approached Hammer Films. That the company promptly turned down the project which would eventually become Polanski’s third film, Cul de Sac, is perhaps not surprising: the robust Manichaeism of Hammer horror at this time stands in stark contrast to Polanski’s distinctly surrealist sensibility. Repulsion, the film that Polanski made before Cul de Sac, bears only a tangential relationship to the country in which it was produced. While the director very convincingly captures the London of the mid- 1960s, he also works to universalise this setting, so that it becomes as much a representation of an existential situation as it is a specific geographical location. The tension between the particular and the general thereby generated is the source of much of the film’s uncanny qualities. It also enables Polanski to pursue a theme which runs through several of his films (for example, The Tenant and Frantic), and that is the reactions of an outsider or foreigner to an alienating, Kafkaesque urban landscape. Repulsion’s restless camera becomes in this sense a correlative of Polanski’s and his central character Carol’s unease in their surroundings. The film is also one of cinema’s finest and most uncompromising treatments of madness. Through a brilliant manipulation of space, time, and sound, Polanski vividly recreates a schizophrenic experi- ence. The essential physicality of his approach is most apparent in his visual treatment of Carol’s flat. As Carol gradually loses her tentative hold on reality, walls are torn asunder, and what initially were small rooms become cavernous, menacing lairs. Significantly, psychoanalysts and other mental health specialists (staple ingredients in most films dealing with madness) are absent throughout. The film offers us an experience of madness rather than an intellectual—and inevitably distancing and reassuring—understanding of that condition. However, it does not follow from this that no explanation is offered for what happens to Carol. Avoiding the case-history ap- proach which could so easily have become reductive and facile, Polanski instead subtly shades her condition into the world through which she moves. Madness is seen to lie not in an individual’s psychology but as emerging from an apparently immutable social reality. In the world of Repulsion the possibilities of meaningful communication between the sexes are limited by the stereotypical roles assigned to male and female: the morgue-like beauty parlour where Carol works stands rigorously opposed to the pub where Colin, her prospective boyfriend, meets his male friends and where the conversation seems rooted in depressingly humourless dirty jokes. The film’s most disturbing moment in this respect is the one where a hopelessly insane Carol applies heavy make-up to her face and lies in bed smiling, a mocking representation of the woman as object around which both the beauty parlour and the dirty jokes are structured. Within this context both Carol and Colin are presented sympa- thetically. There is a delicate poignancy in their early scenes together as they make awkward and increasingly desperate conversation. Their sensitivity renders them uncomfortable in their respective roles but they are incapable of finding other ways of behaving and relating to each other. It appears that only the crass insensitivity embodied in Michael, the lover of Carol’s sister, enables people to survive (although even this character is allowed to exhibit tenderness at the film’s conclusion when he gently carries Carol away from the flat). Polanski seems throughout the film to be suggesting that Carol’s actions merely represent an understandable reaction to a world that, when viewed clearly, is unbearable. It is the bleakest of outlooks, and it is a credit both to Polanski’s enormous technical skill and his humanism that he succeeds so completely in drawing his audi- ence into it. —Peter Hutchings RESERVOIR DOGS USA, 1992 Director: Quentin Tarantino Production: Live America Inc., A Dog Eat Dog production; color, 35mm; running time: 99 minutes. Producer: Lawrence Bender; co-producer: Harvey Keitel; execu- tive producers: Monte Hellman, Richard N. Gladstein, Ronna B. Wallace; screenplay: Quentin Tarantino; photography: Anrzej Sekula; editor: Sally Menks; assistant directors: Jamie Beardsley, Francis R. Mahoney III; production design: David Wasco; sound editors: Curt Schulkey, Chuck Smith, Dave Stone; sound recordists: Ken Segal, Dave Moreno, Matthew C. Belleville, Mark Coffey. Cast: Harvey Keitel (Mr. White/Larry); Tim Roth (Mr. Orange/ Freddy Newendyke); Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde/‘Toothpick’’ Vic Vega); Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink); Chris Penn (Nice Guy Eddie); Lawrence Tierney (Joe Cabot); Randy Brooks (Holdaway); Kirk Baltz (Marvin Nash); Eddie Bunker (Mr. Blue); Quentin Tarantino (Mr. Brown); Steven Wright (K-Billy DJ). Publications Script: Tarantino, Quentin, Reservoir Dogs, London, 1994. Books: Fuller, Graham, ‘‘Answers first, questions later,’’ in Projections 3, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, London, 1994. Dawson, Jeff, Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool, New York, 1995. Barnes, Alan, and Marcus Hearn, Tarantino: A to Z, North Pomfret, 1996; revised edition, 1999. Woods, Paul A., King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino, London, 1996, 1998. Nagel, Uwe, Der rote Faden aus Blut: Erz?hlstrukturen bei Quentin Tarantino, Marburg, 1997. Peary, Gerald, Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Jackson, 1998. Woods, Paul A., Quentin Tarantino: The Film Greek Files, Aus- tin, 1999. RESERVOIR DOGS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1018 Reservoir Dogs Articles: McCarthy, T., Variety (New York), 27 January 1992. Nevers, C., ‘‘Rencontre avec Quentin Tarantino,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1992. Ciment, M., and others, ‘‘Quentin Tarantino,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1992. Lyons, D., ‘‘Scumbags,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November- December 1992. Taubin, A., ‘‘The men’s room,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), December 1992. Case, B., and N. Floyd, ‘‘Dog Days,’’ in Time Out (London), 30 December 1992. Dubeau, A., Séquences (Montreal), January 1993. Newman, Kim, Sight and Sound (London), January 1993. Horguelin, T., ‘‘Noirs et blancs en couleurs,’’ in 24 Images (Mon- treal), February-March 1993. Charlton, S., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), May 1993. Tsalamandris, Con., ‘‘Warehouse of Games,’’ in Cineaste (New York), 1993/94. Willis, S., ‘‘The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 32, September/January 1993/1994. Dalton, Mary, M., and Steve Jarrett, in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1994. Deemer, Charles, and Ira Nayman, ‘‘The Screenplays of Quentin Tarantino: Pop Go the Weasles,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1994. Smith, Gavin, ‘‘When You Know You’re in Good Hands: Quentin Tarantino,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, no. 4, July- August 1994. Williams, D.E., ‘‘Gone to the Dogs,’’ in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), no. 17, August 1994. Pace, William R., ‘‘Writing for Low-Budget Feature Films,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1995. Bush, L., ‘‘Doing Brando,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, January/February 1996. Telotte, J.P., ‘‘Fatal Capers: Strategy and Enigma in Film Noir,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 23, no. 4, Winter 1996. Douglas, Torin, ‘‘Does This Film Go Too Far?’’ in Radio Times (London), vol. 194, no. 3826, 31 May 1997. Mank, G.W., and others, ‘‘Our Favorite Psychos,’’ in Midnight Marquee (Baltimore), no. 55, Fall 1997. *** RETRATO DE TERESAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1019 With Pulp Fiction, his second film as writer/director, Quentin Tarantino has clearly ‘‘arrived,’’ though how long he will stay is another matter. In the present (anti-)critical climate, where reviewers seem motivated primarily by the desire to demonstrate how much they are ‘‘with it’’ rather than by any vestigial sense of the need for responsible evaluation, the latest idols pass by like comets, a brief blaze followed by a swift fizzle: the Coens (Barton Fink) seem already on the way down, and David Lynch (Blue Velvet) has already sunk below the horizon. Pulp Fiction, a work of phenomenal clever- ness and very little intelligence, does not strike me as the realization of the promise of Reservoir Dogs, the embodiment of the kind of creativity that endures and develops. But creativity is scarcely nour- ished by the values of contemporary critical ‘‘taste’’: cynicism, nihilism, the irresponsibilities of postmodernism, ‘‘sick’’ humour. Pulp Fiction gives the critics exactly what they appear to want. Reservoir Dogs (although discernibly the work of the same artist) is another matter. The essential difference between the two films is epitomized in the two torture scenes: that in Reservoir Dogs is genuinely appalling, while that in Pulp Fiction is clearly offered as funny. The earlier film’s relative modesty, combined with its force, tautness and precision, suggests an underlying seriousness of purpose that its successor fritters away in adolescent self-indulgence; it is a far more impressive debut than the first films of Lynch or the Coens. Its distinction lies not only in its formal perfection (the intricately non- chronological narrative structure) and the single-minded rigour with which its thesis (‘‘reservoir dogs’’ end up eating each other) is worked out, but in its very particular relation to the contemporary crisis of ‘‘masculinity.’’ The threat to masculinity represented by feminism—the growing emancipation, independence, and activeness of women—has evoked a range of responses in the culture which are mirrored in the Hollywood cinema. There has been the attempt (almost invariably compromised and recuperative) to depict strong and ‘‘liberated’’ women, and the corresponding attempt to define a new version of ‘‘Mr. Nice Guy,’’ the sensitive and caring male. The alternative response is the hysterical overvaluation and exaggeration of masculinity represented by Schwarzennegger, Stallone, and Norris (often spilling over, at least in the case of the first two, into knowing but uneasy parody that allows us sophisticates to indulge ourselves while not taking it all too seriously). Reservoir Dogs carries this almost to the point of a kind of mass psychosis, the characters (not one of whom remains alive at the end) are destroyed by the very drives that make them so destructive. Women scarcely appear in the film: one is brutally dragged from her car (required for a getaway) and hurled to the ground, the other is shot dead on the rebound by the gang-member she gut-wounds (who turns out to be an undercover cop). The references to women in the dialogue define them exclusively as sex-objects (there are no mar- riages or families). The men’s total and apparently unanimous inabil- ity to relate to women on any other level has two inevitable conse- quences: the repression of their own femininity, and the constantly lurking threat of homosexuality. (Tarantino’s films, and for that matter his interviews, are shot through by homoerotic reference, and less frequently by its converse, homophobia. See especially his account of Top Gun in his cameo appearance as an actor in Sleep With Me). Unable to love women, the men are evaluated in terms of their ability (or in most cases inability) to love each other. The poles are represented by the characters played by Michael Madsen and Harvey Keitel. The former is the film’s explicitly psychotic character, incapa- ble of relating to anyone except by violence. When, during the notorious torture scene, he slices off the cop’s ear with a razor, his immediate taunt defines the act’s essentially sexual nature: ‘‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’’ This is answered at the end of the film by the erotic tenderness with which Keitel cradles and embraces the gut-wounded undercover man (Tim Roth), who responds to this sudden intimacy by confessing his identity—whereupon Keitel shoots him. —Robin Wood RETRATO DE TERESA (Portrait of Teresa) Cuba, 1979 Director: Pastor Vega Production: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC); color, 35mm. Released 1979. Filmed in Cuba. Screenplay: Ambrosio Fornet. Cast: Adolfo Llauradó (Ramón); Daisy Granados (Teresa). Publications Books: Chanan, Michael, The Cuban Image, London, 1985. Burton, Julianne, editor, Cinema and Social Change in Latin Amer- ica: Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin, Texas, 1986. Articles: Ranvaud, Don, ‘‘Pastor Vega: An Interview,’’ in Framework (Lon- don), Spring 1979. Moskowitz, G., in Variety (New York), 5 September 1979. Segers, F., in Variety (New York), 7 November 1979. Peyton, P., and C. Broullon, ‘‘Portrait of Teresa: An Interview with Pastor Vega and Daisy Granados,’’ in Cineaste (New York), no. 1, 1979–80. Randall, M., ‘‘Portrait of Teresa: A Letter from Havana,’’ in Cineaste (New York), no. 1, 1979–80. Gonzalea Acosta, A., ‘‘Con Teresa, punto y seguido . . . ,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 97, 1980. Rich, B., ‘‘Portrait of Teresa: Double Day, Double Standard,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), May 1980. Allen, Tom, in Film Comment (New York), vol. 17, May-June 1981. Coleman, John, ‘‘Portrait of Teresa,’’ in New Statesman, vol. 101, 5 June 1981. Prieto, L., ‘‘Retrato de Teresa: De la realidad a la ficcion,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 98, 1981. Burton, Julianne, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1981. Imeson, J., in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1981. Ahlander, R. Centenari, interview with Daisy Granados, in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 24, no. 5, 1982. RETRATO DE TERESA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1020 Retrato de Teresa Interview with Pastor Vega, in Casablanca (Madrid), October 1982. Film Library Quarterly (New York), vol. 16, no. 4, 1983. Gonzalez, J. A., ‘‘Retrato de Daisy Granados,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 104, 1983. Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 198, 1984. *** The most polemical film in the history of Cuban cinema, Portrait of Teresa was seen by 500,000 spectators in less than two months and has been the focus of more than two dozen articles and the subject of innumerable marital discussions on the island. The reason for such controversy lies not in the form utilized by the film (it resembles an undistinguished ‘‘made-for-TV’’ movie), but in its content: a critique of machismo and its double standard for men and women. Ramón objects to Teresa’s growing involvement in her work and polit- ico-cultural activities, accusing her of neglecting her household duties. Despite the fact that they both work full-time, Teresa has to labour the familiar ‘‘double-day’’ of women, doing the domestic chores before and after her shift in a textile factory. Her attempts to incorporate herself into some of the cultural activities offered by the revolution are met by Ramón’s increasingly intransigent defense of his male privileges, and they separate. The film is a criticism to the ‘‘Law of the Funnel’’ (‘‘Ley del embudo’’), under which a different set of rules apply for men than for women. Impelled by its female integrants, the Cuban revolution has made great efforts to overcome the traditional subservience of women, insisting on a coherence of theory and practice and the integration of political principles into daily life. In the film’s pivotal scene, Teresa confronts Ramón’s assertion that he has changed (and thus wants her to return to him) by asking him how he would feel if she had had a relationship with someone else, as he did. His answer, ‘‘It’s not the same,’’ confirms her suspicion that he continues to maintain a double standard, and determines her decision to remain separated from him. The leading actors spent much time and effort familiarizing themselves with the lives of the workers they were to represent, and were caught up in the controversy that swept Cuba after the release of the film. Daisy Granados (Teresa) saw it as an issue of the Cuban revolution: ‘‘I think that we women still make too many concessions to men. However, Teresa is no feminist symbol, but the conclusive proof that a new type of human being is arising among us. The revolution needs Teresa, because she is a symbol to all of us who RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1021 believe that the revolution is a constant and permanent advance toward a superior and more complex person.’’ Adolfo Llauradó (Ramón) saw it somewhat differently: ‘‘I’ve grown, and I think that intellectually I’m totally in agreement with women’s equality. I un- derstand Teresa’s necessities and aspirations, but when they clash with patterns and customs established throughout millenniums, I can’t deny that, like Ramón, it disturbs me.’’ The Cuban revolution has consistently struggled against machismo and its repressive patters, among other things, by explicitly legislating against a double sexual morality and by requiring men to share in the housework. However, the profundity of male-dominance is perhaps nowhere expressed more ironically than in the fact that, although both the director and scriptwriter see themselves as battling against ‘‘pater- nalism,’’ no women were included at decision-making levels in the film. Portrait of Teresa is a useful film, though hardly a radical one. The fact that it provoked such controversy in Cuba is indicative of how far we all have to go. —John Mraz THE RETURN OF THE JEDI See THE STAR WARS SAGA RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (Guns in the Afternoon) USA, 1962 Director: Sam Peckinpah Production: MGM; CinemaScope, Metrocolor; running time: 93 minutes; length: 8,391 feet. Released May 1962. Producer: Richard E. Lyons; screenplay: N. B. Stone, Jr.; assistant director: Hal Polaire; photography: Lucien Ballard; editor: Frank Santillo; sound: Franklin Milton; art directors: George W. Davis, Leroy Coleman; music: George Bassman. Cast: Randolph Scott (Gil Westrum); Joel McCrea (Steve Judd); Ronald Starr (Heck Longtree); Mariette Hartley (Elsa Knudsen); James Drury (Billy Hammond); R. G. Armstrong (Joshua Knudsen); Edgar Buchanan (Judge Tolliver); Jenie Jackson (Kate); John Ander- son (Elder Hammon); L. Q. Jones (Sylvus Hammond); Warren Oates (Henry Hammond); John Davis Chandler (Jimmy Hammond); Car- men Phillips (Saloon Girl). Publications Books: Kitses, Jim, Horizons West, London 1969. Evans, Max, Sam Peckinpah: Master of Violence, Vermillion, South Dakota, 1972. Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley, 1975. Caprara, Valerio, Peckinpah, Bologna, 1976. McKinney, Doug, Sam Peckinpah, Boston, 1979. Butler, T., Crucified Heroes: The Films of Sam Peckinpah, Lon- don, 1979. Seydor, Paul, Peckinpah: The Western Films, Urbana, Illinois, 1980. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-Up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981. Simmons, Garner, Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage, Austin, Texas, 1982. Arnold, Frank, and Ulrich von Berg, Sam Peckinpah: Eine Outlaw in Hollywood, Frankfurt, 1987. Buscombe, Ed, editor, BFI Companion to the Western, London, 1988. Fine, Marshall, Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah, New York, 1992. Bliss, Michael, Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah, Carbondale, 1993. Weddle, David, If They Move, Kill ‘Em: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, New York, 1994. Prince, Stephen, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, Austin, 1998. Seydor, Paul, Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration, Champaign, 1999. Articles: Films in Review (New York), April 1962. Variety (New York), 9 May 1962. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 16 May 1962. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1962. Jones, DuPre, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1962. Scott, Darrin, ‘‘Photographing Ride the High Country,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), July 1962. Positif (Paris), June 1963. McArthur, Colin, ‘‘Sam Peckinpah’s West,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1967. Reisner, Joel, and Bruce Kane, ‘‘Sam Peckinpah,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), June 1970. ‘‘Peckinpah Issue’’ of Film Heritage (New York), Winter 1974–75. Pettit, Arthur, ‘‘Nightmare and Nostalgia: The Cinema West of Sam Peckinpah,’’ in Western Humanities Review (Salt Lake City), Spring 1975. Kael, Pauline, ‘‘Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah,’’ in New Yorker, 12 January 1976. Lumière du Cinéma (Paris), October 1977. ‘‘Sam Peckinpah Section’’ of Film Comment (New York), Febru- ary 1981. Sanchez Valdés, J., in Casablanca (Madrid), October 1981. Skerry, P. J., ‘‘The Western Film: A Sense of an Ending,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 3. 1990. Nielsen, R., ‘‘Ray’s Way: James Drury,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 193, July 1991. Roth-Bettoni, Didier, ‘‘Coups de feu dans la Sierra: l’ouest du crépuscule,’’ in Mensuel du Cinéma, no. 12, December 1993. Humphreys, J., ‘‘L.Q. Jones,’’ in Psychotronic Video (Narrowsburg), no. 21, 1995. ‘‘I primi film,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Milan), no. 22, 2nd ed., March 1997. *** RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1022 Ride the High Country Apart from his first feature, the rarely screened The Deadly Companions, few of Sam Peckinpah’s films have escaped contro- versy. The obvious exception is Ride the High Country, acclaimed a classic within months of its release—and which still remains the Peckinpah movie that people who hate Peckinpah movies can like. It’s clear enough why this should be so. Such violence as occurs is relatively muted; the film exudes a melancholy, autumnal gentleness, enhanced by the presence of two much-loved veterans of the genre, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, in what are evidently conceived as farewell performances. The characters—the upright lawman, the bad guy who becomes good in the end, the brash youngster who learns wisdom, and so on—are all comfortingly familiar types, and the plot itself springs few surprises. With Ride, Peckinpah openly staked his claim to the mantle of Great Western Director, heir to Ford, Mann, and Boetticher—before striking out, in Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch, on the maverick trail to a more equivocal position as (in Jim Kitses’s phrase) ‘‘John Ford’s bastard son.’’ Yet, beneath all the conventional elements—which are handled, it should be said, with a vigour and assurance which prevent them ever seeming merely routine—the thematic preoccupations of the later films are already in place. If Peckinpah didn’t invent the elegiac, passing-of-the-west western (Ford, for one, could stake a claim with Liberty Valance), he made more telling use of it than any other director, and Ride locates us there from the start. From the majestic wildness of the ‘‘high country’’ we cut, as the credits end, to the bustling vulgarity of a California township where the shabby old lawman, Steve Judd (McCrea), is nearly run down by an automobile (anticipating the fate of another Peckinpah hero, Cable Hogue). Meanwhile his former colleague, Gil Westrum (Scott) has been reduced to running a carnival side-show, got up in a phony Buffalo Bill outfit as ‘‘The Oregon Kid.’’ These two, creaky and rheumatic, rehashing ancient exploits, bedding down in baggy long-johns, clearly enough embody the old, heroic, outmoded west. But they also foreshadow, in their contrasted attitudes, such later opposed pairs as Bishop and Thornton (Wild Bunch), Steiner and Stransky (Cross of Iron), Billy and Pat Garrett. Ride, like most of Peckinpah’s work, explores the tensions of relative morality. Judd professes absolute values (‘‘He was right. I was wrong,’’ he says of his one-time mentor. ‘‘That’s something you just know’’), and can trade biblical texts with Knudsen, the grimly puritanical rancher. But after Westrum’s treachery, doubts creep in. ‘‘My father says there’s only right and wrong, good and evil,’’ says RIEN QUE LES HEURESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1023 Elsa, Knudsen’s daughter. ‘‘It isn’t that simple, is it?’’ ‘‘No, it isn’t,’’ Judd responds. ‘‘It should be—but it isn’t.’’ The old, clear-cut frontier code—the code of a Ford movie—no longer holds up; and maybe it never really did. Having set up his stock types, Peckinpah slyly subverts them. Judge Tolliver, the venal old drunk performing Elsa’s wedding ceremony in a brothel, comes out with a wistful speech about marriage: ‘‘A good marriage—there’s a kind of simple glory about it.’’ Even the squalid Hammond clan can be goaded into an open showdown through their ‘‘sense of family honor’’—which, of course, promptly gets them killed. By all the conventions of the genre, Westrum should die in the final shootout, atoning for his earlier misdeeds. But it’s Judd who dies, gazing up at the austere purity of the mountains, granted his wish ‘‘to enter my house justified’’ (a phrase Peckinpah borrowed from his own father). Westrum can adapt and compromise; he survives. The casting of Scott, icon of integrity, as the devious Westrum, is a master stroke; and while Peckinpah didn’t originate the idea (McCrea and Scott, initially cast the other way round, spontaneously suggested a swap) he makes shrewd use of it, bringing out a foxiness which, we can recognize, was always latent in the actor’s persona. That Westrum should survive, though, was the director’s idea, part of his extensive—and uncredited—rewrite of Stone’s script. Ride also marks Peckinpah’s first cinematic collaboration with the veteran Lucien Ballard, whose lyrical widescreen cinematography makes it one of the most beautiful of all westerns. Not for the last time, a Peckinpah movie hit studio problems. Ride, victim of a front-office feud, was taken away from him in post- production and released as a second feature. Critical enthusiasm and prizes at European festivals embarrassed MGM into giving it a re- release; and its reputation remained unaffected by the hostility aroused by Peckinpah’s subsequent work. If not, as some have claimed, his best film, it’s surely his most perfect. —Philip Kemp RIEN QUE LES HEURES (Only the Hours) France, 1926 Director: Alberto Cavalcanti Production: Néofilm (Paris); black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 45 minutes. Released 1926. Filmed in Paris. Photography: Jimmy Rogers; editor: Alberto Cavalcanti; art direc- tor: M. Mirovitch. Publications Books: Klaue, Wolfgang, and others, Cavalcanti, Berlin, 1962. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989. Articles: Grierson, John, ‘‘Documentary,’’ in Cinema Quarterly (London), Winter 1932. ‘‘Cavalcanti: His Film Works,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1955. Rodriquez Monegal, Emir, ‘‘Albert Cavalcanti,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Televisions (Berkeley), Summer 1955. Minish, Geoffrey, ‘‘Cavalcanti in Paris,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1970. Beylie, Claude, and others, ‘‘Alberto Cavalcanti,’’ in Ecran (Paris), November 1974. Rodriguez Monegal, Emil, ‘‘Alberto Cavalcanti,’’ in Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Jacobs, Lewis, ‘‘Two Aspects of the City: Cavalcanti and Ruttmann,’’ in The Documentary Tradition, New York, 1979. Buache, F., in Travelling, no. 56/57, Spring 1980. Nave, B., ‘‘Alberto Cavalcanti: portrait d’un explorateur du cinema,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), no. 195, June/July 1989. Cosandey, R., ‘‘Alberto Cavalcanti,’’ in Plateau, vol. 10, no. 2, 1989. Rodrigues, A., and A. Marchand, ‘‘Alberto Cavalcanti: An ‘Extraor- dinary Ordinary Man,’’’ in Griffithiana, no. 60/61, October 1997. *** Rien que les heures was the first of the ‘‘city symphony’’ films. It was followed by Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City) (1927, Walter Ruttmann), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera) (Moscow, 1929, Dziga Vertov), and Regen (Rain) (Amsterdam, 1929, Joris Ivens). This genre grew out of the interest of 1920s avant-garde filmmakers in the interrelationship between space and time. It is related to the method of the earlier French impressionist painters in their attempts to capture quick views and concentration on surfaces and light. The genre is also related to novels of the time which offer a cross-section of city life during a limited period, e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925). The city symphony films were one of the strands that led into the documentary; Cavalcanti, Ruttmann, Vertov, and Ivens all subsequently became identified with documentaries. Paul Rotha, of British documentary, called these filmmakers ‘‘continental realists.’’ Cavalcanti moved from the avant- garde of France in the 1920s to the documentary of Britain in the 1930s. Rien que les heures is a curious and fascinating mixture of the aesthetic and the social. It deals with Paris from pre-dawn to well into the following night—roughly 24 hours. The opening titles promise that we will not be looking at the elegant life but rather at that of the lower classes. Thus the social viewpoint is established. A philosophi- cal thesis about time and space is also introduced and returned to. At the end we are asked, after we have seen what the filmmaker can show us of Paris, to consider Paris in relation to Peking. The titles assert that we can fix a point in space, immobilize a moment in time, but that space and time both escape our possession. Life is ongoing and interrelated. Without their monuments you can’t tell cities apart. RIO BRAVO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1024 Rien que les heures Mainly the film is devoted to contrasting scenes and changing activities of Paris during the passing hours: early morning revellers, deserted streets, the first workers appear; then there are workers at work; then lunchtime; some people are swimming in the afternoon; work ceases, rest and recreation occupy the evening. But among these views of unstaged actuality are inserted three brief, staged, frag- mented narratives. The subjects of all three are female—an old derelict (drunken or ill), a prostitute, a newspaper vendor—all of them pathetic figures. The overall mood of the film is a bit downbeat; there is a sweet sadness, a sentimental toughness about it that looks ahead to the poetic realism of the 1930s and the films of Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné. Still, Cavalcanti’s viewpoint about all of this seems to be one of detachment: ‘‘c’est la vie,’’ he seems to be saying. Though some concern with social matters is evident, the considerable number and variety of highly stylized special effects—wipes, multiple exposures, fast motion, spinning images, split screen, freeze frames—seem to confirm that Calvalcanti’s greatest interest was in the artistic experimentation. —Jack C. Ellis RIFIFI See DU RIFIFI CHEZ LES HOMMES RIO BRAVO USA, 1959 Director: Howard Hawks Production: Armada Productions; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 141 minutes. Released 1959. Filmed in Old Tucson, Arizona. Producer: Howard Hawks; screenplay: Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, from a novelette by B. H. McCampbell; photography: Russell Harlan; editor: Folmar Blangsted; sound: Robert B. Lee; art director: Leo K. Kuter; music director: Dimitri Tiomkin; songs: Dimitri Tiomkin and Francis Webster; costume designer: Marjorie Best; makeup: Gordan Bau. RIO BRAVOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1025 Cast: John Wayne (John T. Chance); Dean Martin (Dude); Ricky Nelson (Colorado Ryan); Angie Dickinson (Feathers); Walter Bren- nan (Stumpy); Ward Bond (Pat Wheeler); John Russell (Nathan Burdette); Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez (Carlos); Estelita Rodriguez (Consuelo); Claude Akins (Joe Burdett); Malcolm Atterbury (Jake); Harry Carey, Jr. (Harold); Bob Steele (Matt Harris); Myron Healey (Barfly); Fred Graham and Tom Monroe (Hired hands); Riley Hill (Messenger). Publications Books: Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Howard Hawks, New York, 1962. Fenin, George N., The Western: From Silents to Cinerama, New York, 1962. Agel, Henri, Romance américaine, Paris, 1963. Rieupevrout, Jean-Louis, La Grande Aventure du Western, Paris, 1964. Missiaen, Jean-Claude, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1966. Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks, New York, 1968; revised edition, 1981. Ricci, Mark, Boris Zmijewsky, and Steven Zmijewsky, The Films of John Wayne, New York, 1970; revised edition, as The Complete Films of John Wayne, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1983. Gigli, Jean A., Howard Hawks, Paris, 1971. McBride, Joseph, editor, Focus on Howard Hawks, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. French, Philip, Westerns—Aspects of a Movie Genre, New York, 1973. Willis, D. C., The Films of Howard Hawks, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1975. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Western Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Murphy, Kathleen A., Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Ciment, Michael, Les Conquérants d’un nouveau monde: Essais sur le cinéma américain, Paris, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. McBride, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks, Berkeley, 1982. Mast, Gerald, Howard Hawks, Storyteller, New York, 1982. Poague, Leland, Howard Hawks, Boston, 1982. Simsolo, No?l, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1984. Kieskalt, Charles John, The Official John Wayne Reference Book, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. Shepherd, Donald, and others, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne, London, 1985. Branson, Clark, Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study, Los Angeles, 1987. Lepper, David, John Wayne, London, 1987. Buscombe, Ed, editor, BFI Companion to the Western, London, 1988. Levy, Emanuel, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1988. Riggin, Judith M., John Wayne: A Bio-Bibliography, New York, 1992. Fagen, Herb, Duke, We’re Glad We Knew You: John Wayne’s Friends and Colleagues Remember His Remarkable Life, New York, 1996. Hillier, Jim, Howard Hawks: American Artist, Champaign, 1997. McCarthy, Todd, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, New York, 1997. Roberts, Randy, John Wayne: American, Lincoln, 1997. Rio Bravo Articles: Films and Filming (London), 1959. Perez, Michel, ‘‘Howard Hawks et le western,’’ in Présence du Cinéma (Paris), July-September 1959. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘The World of Howard Hawks,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July 1962 and August 1962. ‘‘Howard Hawks,’’ in Movie (London), December 1962. Wood, Robin, in Movie (London), December 1962. ‘‘Hawks Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1963. Austen, David, ‘‘Gunplay and Horses,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October 1968. Hall, Dennis John, ‘‘Tall in the Saddle,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Renaud, T., in Cinéma (Paris), January 1973. Bourget, J. L., ‘‘Hawks et le mythe de l’ouest américain,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1977. Masson, A., ‘‘Organiser le sensible,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-Au- gust 1977. Boyero, C., in Casablanca (Madrid), July-August 1981. Daney, S., ‘‘Un art adulte,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1992. Sijan, S., ‘‘Une image de Rio Bravo,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Cabrera Infante, G., ‘‘Infante,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 5, 1994. *** THE RIVER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1026 Rio Bravo is one of the supreme achievements (hence justifica- tions) of ‘‘classical Hollywood,’’ that complex network of determi- nants that includes the star system, the studio system, the system of genres and conventions, a highly developed grammar and syntax of shooting and editing, the interaction of which made possible an art at once personal and collaborative, one nourished by a rich and vital tradition: it is an art that belongs now to the past; the period of Rio Bravo was its last flowering. The film at once is one of the greatest westerns and the most complete statements of the themes of director Howard Hawks. One can distinguish two main currents within the western genre, the ‘‘historical’’ and the ‘‘conventional’’: the western that is concerned with the American past (albeit with its mythology as much as its reality), and the western that plays with and develops a set of conventions, archetypes, ‘‘stock’’ figures. Ford’s westerns are the finest examples of the former impulse, and in the westerns of Anthony Mann (for example, Man of the West) the two achieve perfect fusion. Rio Bravo is among the purest of all ‘‘conventional’’ westerns. Here, history and the American past are of no concern, a point amply demonstrated by the fact that the film is a virtual remake (in its thematic pattern, its characters and character relationships, even down to sketches of dialogue) of Hawks’s earlier Only Angels Have Wings (set in the Andes mountains) and To Have and Have Not (set on Martinique). Hawks’s stylized and anonymous western town is not a microcosm of American civilization at a certain point in its development but an abstract setting within which his recurrent concerns and relationships can be played out. All the characters are on one level ‘‘western’’ archetypes: the infallible sheriff, the fallible friend, the ‘‘travelling lady,’’ the garrulous sidekick, the comic Mexican, the evil land-baron. On another level, however, they are Hawksian archetypes: the overlay makes possible the richness of characterization, the detail of the acting, so that here the archetypes (western and Hawksian) achieve their ultimate elaboration. With this goes the remarkable and varied use Hawks makes of actors’ personas: Martin, Dickinson, and Brennan have never surpassed (perhaps never equalled) their performances here, and the use of Wayne is etremely subtle and idiosyncratic, at once drawing on his ‘‘heroic’’ status and satirizing its limitations. The film represents Hawks’s most successful transcendence of the chief ‘‘binary opposition’’ of his work, its division into adventure films and comedies. Here the thematic concerns of the action pictures— self-respect, personal integrity, loyalty, stoicism, the interplay of mutual respect and affection—combines with the sexual tensions of the comedies (Wayne’s vulnerability to women permitting a fuller development of this than is possible with, for example, Bogart in To Have and Have Not). The ambiguous relationship of Hawks’s work to dominant American ideological assumptions (on the one hand the endorsement of individualism and personal initiative, on the other the rejection of established society in favour of the ‘‘primitive’’ male group, the total lack of interest in such central American ideals as marriage, home and family) permeates the whole film. The ‘‘gay subtext’’ that many critics have sensed in Hawks’s films—their tendency to become (in his own words) ‘‘love stories between men’’—surfaces quite clearly in the Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson relationship, though it is never allowed expression beyond the ex- change of looks and is swiftly ‘‘contained’’ within the group (a pro- gression beautifully enacted in the famous song-sequence). Within a system necessarily committed, at least on surface level, to reinforc- ing the status quo, Hawks’s cinema continuously suggests the possi- bility of alternative forms of social and sexual organization. —Robin Wood THE RIVER See He Liu THE RIVER USA, 1937 Director: Pare Lorentz Production: Farm Security Administration, United States Govern- ment; black and white, 35mm; running time: 32 minutes. Released 20 October 1937, premiering in New Orleans. Filmed October 1936–1 March 1937 along the Mississippi River Valley, beginning in West Virginia and concluding in New Orleans. Cost: budgeted at $50,000, plus additional funds for shooting flood sequences. Screenplay: Pare Lorentz; photography: Floyd Crosby, Stacy Woodward, and Willard Van Dyke; editors: Pare Lorentz with Lloyd Nosler; music: Virgil Thomson; conductor: Alexander Smallens. Cast: Thomas Chalmers (Narrator). Awards: Venice International Film Festival, Best Documentary, 1938. Publications Script: Lorentz, Pare, The River: A Scenario, New York, 1938. Books: Snyder, Robert L., Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film, Norman, Oklahoma 1968, 1993. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Dyer MacCann, Richard, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Alexander, William, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931–1942, Princeton, New Jersey, 1981. Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989. Lorentz, Pare, FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts, Reno, 1992. Articles: Time (New York), 8 November 1937. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 10 November 1937. THE RIVERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1027 Seldes, Gilbert, in Scribner’s (New York), January 1938. Barnes, Harold, in Herald-Tribune (New York), 5 February 1938. Nugent, Frank, in New York Times, 5 and 6 February 1938. Saturday Review of Literature (New York), April 1938. ‘‘Award to Pare Lorentz.’’ in Magazine of Art (New York), July 1938. Goodman, Ezra, ‘‘The American Documentary,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1938. White, W. L., ‘‘Pare Lorentz,’’ in Scribner’s (New York), Janu- ary 1939. ‘‘Pare Lorentz,’’ in Current Biography Yearbook, New York, 1940. Lorentz, Pare, ‘‘The Narration of The River,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1965. Van Dyke, Willard, ‘‘Letters from The River,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1965. ‘‘Conscience of the 30s,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 5 August 1968. Engle, Harrison, ‘‘30 Years of Social Inquiry: An Interview with Willard Van Dyke,’’ in Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Rollins, P. C., ‘‘Ideology and Film Rhetoric: Three Documentaries of the New Deal Era,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), no. 2, 1976. Miller, C. A., ‘‘A Note of Pare Lorentz’s The River,’’ in Film and History (Newark, New Jersey), December 1980. Georgakas, D., ‘‘Cinema of the New Deal,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 21, no. 4, 1995. *** Persuasive and poetic, The River is probably the best film ever made about conservation of natural resources. Produced by the U.S. government during 1936, released in theatres in 1937 to extraordinary critical acclaim, it competed with 70 other films to win the prize for documentary at the Venice Film Festival in 1938. For many years, The River was a popular rental item for 16mm libraries for classroom use, and it is still used to evoke the spirit of the 1930s in history courses. Brilliant and beautiful today, especially when projected in an auditorium from a recent print, it is a prime example of art bearing a message. The River is usually thought of in connection with The Plow That Broke the Plains (1935–36), also produced for the special New Deal relief agency called the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) and also written and directed by Pare Lorentz. The first film had been about the overplowing of midwestern land, resulting in the devastating dust storms of the 1930s. The second film was about the erratic and widespread cutting of trees and destruction of grass cover which resulted in repeated floods on the Mississippi. Lorentz was a young maverick liberal from West Virginia who used to hear his father and friends sound off on the dangers to the land when timber was cut from the ridges and chemicals were dumped in the rivers. He left the state university to go to work as a writer in New York City, working for the General Electric house organ, for News- week (where he did a long piece on the dust storms), and for ten years as movie editor for Judge magazine. Friends of his wife in Washing- ton brought him together with Rex Tugwell, one of the Franklin Roosevelt ‘‘brain trusters’’ who had plans for publicizing widely the need for conservation and for government action. Although as a critic he was something of an expert on movies, Lorentz had never in his life been responsible for making any part of a motion picture. He learned how on The Plow That Broke the Plains, which was originally proposed as a training film for RA staff people helping farmers to be ‘‘resettled’’ on good land and use it more effectively. It developed into a highly controversial documentary shown in theatres, reviewed by critics, and used in the 1936 campaign by Democratic candidates for Congress. In style and approach, it came out as strong negative propaganda, ending with dust and displaced people, leaving audiences with a sense of guilt and hopelessness, The River became a different kind of persuasive statement. It ended with an extended coda, starting with a map of the valley, from the Missouri down to the gulf, then closing in on the Tennessee River, where the Tennessee Valley Authority had begun the taming of the floods, the control of navigation, and the kind of planning for power distribution which would bring safety and prosperity to that valley. It was a positive and heartening conclusion, an affirmation of man’s political ability to plan. The River was also a unique attempt to offer a kind of American frontier style of poetry in its narration. Twice a list of the major rivers in the Mississippi system is given a rhythmic reading, once to suggest how the waters come down every spring, again to show how they come down disastrously at time of flood. This risky kind of mono- logue occurred to Lorentz as an ideal way to write an article in McCall’s magazine. It received such a big response of reader mail that he decided to adapt it for his film. The communicative virtues of the creative imagination are nicely illustrated in this U.S. government film, which was in large part based upon an official document. The Mississippi Valley Committee had written about forest and grass cover: ‘‘When this protective cover is disturbed by forest destruction, tillage, or overgrazing of livestock, erosion is accelerated.’’ Lorentz the artist put it this way: ‘‘Year in, year out, the water comes down, down from a thousand hillsides, washing the top off the Valley.’’ The trusting, powerful narration, combined with the compelling use of U.S. themes in Virgil Thomson’s musical track and the aesthetic values of the black-and-white photography—evoking beauty in the early scenes, stark tragedy later—made The River a striking achievement from almost every critical standpoint. Frank Nugent in the New York Times, called it ‘‘poetic, stirring, and majestic,’’ Gilbert Seldes in Scribner’s gave the film a special write-up, and Howard Barnes in the New York Herald-Tribune praised its ‘‘brooding beauty and impact,’’ its unity and economy, making ‘‘social history vital, understandable, and dramatic.’’ As for popular response, theatre managers reported to Paramount, which had agreed to release it, that The River drew audience ‘‘applause at every showing.’’ Lorentz went on to make and to supervise other films for an agency Roosevelt and his advisers called the U.S. Film Service. He hired Robert Flaherty to do a film called The Land for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and Joris Ivens to dramatize the services to one family by the Rural Electrification Administration in Power and the Land. But his own melodramatic feature-length story about a local maternity centre, The Fight for Life, was objected to by Congressional committees and by Senator Robert Taft on the floor of the Senate. The threat of World War II and a history of conflict between the Congress and Pare Lorentz’s various sponsors overshad- owed any possibilities for good in centralized U.S. government film making comparable to such agencies in England and Canada. Appro- priations for the Film Service were finally denied in 1940. —Richard Dyer MacCann ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1028 THE ROAD See STRADA, LA THE ROAD TO LIFE See PUTYOVKA V ZHIZN ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI (Rocco and His Brothers) Italy-France, 1960 Director: Luchino Visconti Production: Titanus and Les Films Marceau; black and white, 35mm; running time: 182 minutes; length: 4,973 meters originally, usually distributed in versions of 3,600 meters. Released 15 October 1960, premiered at Venice Film Festival on 6 September 1960. Producer: Goffredo Lombardo; subject: Luchino Visconti, Vasco Pratolini, and Suco Cecchi D’Amico; screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cocchi d’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Enrico Medioli, from the book Il ponte della ghisolfa by Giovanni Testori; assistant directors: Jerry Macc and Lucio Orlandini; pho- tography: Giuseppe Rotunno; editor: Mario Serandrei; sound: Giovanni Rossi; art director: Mario Garbuglia; music: Nino Rota; costume designer: Piero Tosi. Cast: Alain Delon (Rocco); Renato Salvatori (Simone); Annie Girardot (Nadia); Katina Paxinou (Rosaria); Roger Hanin (Morini); Paolo Stoppa (Impresario); Suzy Delair (Luisa); Claudia Cardinale (Ginetta); Spiros Focas (Vincenzo); Rocco Vidolazzi (Luca); Corrado Pani (Ivo); Max Cartier (Ciro); Alessandra Panaro (Ciro’s fiancée); Claudia Mori (Laundry worker); Becker Masocro (Nadia’s mother). Awards: David di Donatello prize for best production, 1960; Venice Film Festival, Special Jury Prize and International Film Critics Award, 1960; Festival of Workers (Czechoslovakia), First Prize, 1961. Publications Script: Visconti, Luchino, Vasco Pratolini, and Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Rocco e i suoi fratelli, edited by Guido Aristarco and G. Carancini, Milan, 1960; also published Bologna, 1978; as Rocco and His Brothers, in Luchino Visconti: Three Screenplays, New York, 1970. Books: Elizondon, Salvador, Luchino Visconti, Mexico, 1963. Baldelli, Pio, I film di Luchino Visconti, Manduria, 1965. Sitova, V., Luchino Visconti, Moscow, 1965. Guillaume, Yves, Visconti, Paris, 1966. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti, New York, 1968; revised edition, 1983. Buache, Freddy, Le cinema italien, d’Antonioni a Rosi, Yverdon, 1969. Speranzi, M., editor, L’Opera di Luchino Visconti, Florence, 1969. Ferrara, Guiseppe, Visconti, Paris, 2nd edition, 1970. La crisi dell’uomo e della societe nei film di Visconti e di Antonioni, Alba, 1972. Luchino Visconti, Munich, 1975. Callegari, G., and N. Lodato, editors, Leggere Visconti, Pavia, 1976. Ferrara, Adelio, editor, Visconti: il cinema, Milan, 1977. Tornabuoni, Lietta, editor, Album Visconti, Milan, 1978. Stirling, Monica, A Screen of Time, New York, 1979. Visconti, Luchino, Il mio teatro, Bologna, 1979. Servadio, Gaia, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1980; translated as Luchino Visconti, New York, 1983. Rondolino, Gianni, Luchino Visconti, Turin, 1981. Bencivenni, Alessandro, Luchino Visconti, Florence, 1982. Tonetti, Claretta, Luchino Visconti, Boston, 1983. Ishaghpour, Youssef, Luchino Visconti: Le sens et l’image, Paris, 1984. Sanzio, Alain, and Paul-Louis Thirard, Luchino Visconti: Cinéaste, Paris, 1984. De Guisti, Luciano, I film di Luchino Visconti, Rome, 1985. Geitel, Klaus, and others, Luchino Visconti, 4th edition, Munich, 1985. Mancini, Elaine, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Villien, Bruno, Visconti, Paris, 1986. Schifano, Laurence, Luchino Visconti: Les feux de la passion, Paris, 1987. Rohdie, Sam, Rocco and His Brothers, London, 1992. Renzi, Renzo, Visconti segreto, Rome, 1994. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, New York, 1998. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: His Life, His Films, New York, 1998. Tonetti, Luchino Visconti, New York, 1998. Articles: Moravia, Alberto, in Espresso, 6 March 1960. ‘‘Visconti Interview,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), September-Octo- ber 1970. Dal Sasso, Rino, in Filmcritica (Rome), October 1960. Visconti, Luchino, ‘‘Oltre il fato dei Malavoglia,’’ in Vie nuove, October 1960. Prouse, Derek, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. Pandolfi, Vito, in Film (Milan), 1961. Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘The Earth Still Trembles.’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1961. Visconti, Luchino, ‘‘The Miracle That Gave Man Crumbs,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1961. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 9 March 1961. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Premier Plan (Lyons), May 1961. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 28 June 1961. Benayoun, Robert, in Positif (Paris), July 1961. Young, Vernon, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1961. Manvell, Roger, in Films and Filming (London), October 1961. Armitage, P., ‘‘Visconti and Rocco,’’ in Film (London), Winter 1961. ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1029 Rocco e i suoi fratelli Minoff, L., ‘‘New Old Master,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 29 December 1962. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), no. 26–27, 1963. Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1963. Buschkowsky, Madina, in Jahrbuch des Film 1962, Berlin, 1964. Koppel, Helga, in Film in Italien, Italien in Film, Berlin, 1970. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Luchino Visconti,’’ in Brighton Film Review, February 1970. Korte, Walter, ‘‘Marxism and Formalism in the Films of Luchino Visconti,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1971. Zolotuski, I., ‘‘Treska i sintez,’’ in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), Janu- ary 1972. Verstappen, W., ‘‘Visconti laat zich niet bij pilsje navertellen: Rocco op de montagetafel,’’ in Skoop (Amsterdam), August-Septem- ber 1978. New York Times, 7 January 1979. Verhage, G., in Skrien (Amsterdam), May 1979. Shivas, Mark, in Film (London), November 1979. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), February-March 1983. Meyer, M. P., in Skrien (Amsterdam), April-May 1984. Listener, vol. 124, no. 3188, 25 October 1990. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 57, no. 683, December 1990. Canby, V., ‘‘Review/Film: Vintage Visconti, At Full Length,’’ in New York Times, vol. 141, C8, 24 January 1992. Brown, G., ‘‘Family Plots,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 37, 4 February 1992. Ehrenstein, David, ‘‘Rocco Is One Of the Key Works of Luchino Visconti’s Career,’’ in The Advocate, no. 604, 2 June 1992. *** Rocco e i suoi fratelli appeared in the same year as Fellini’s La dolce vita, and together they indicated, in opposite ways, the major possibilities for the Italian cinema of that decade. As artistically successful as director Visconti’s earlier La terra trema (1948) and Senso (1954), Rocco is, however, even more rigorous and has its roots in a larger and richer cultural base. Although not an adaption of any particular literary piece, it draws from works as diverse as Dostoevski’s The Idiot (Myshkin inspiring the character of Rocco, Rogosin inspir- ing that of Simone), Giovanni Testori’s stories of Milan (especially Il THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1030 ponte della Ghisolfa), and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. The film also displays the interests and the realistic style of most of Visconti’s theatre work from 1945, which included studies of emi- grants and the social community to which they belong, as in his staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from a Bridge (1958). Most Italian critics saw this film as the finest example of the critical realism called for in the writings of Lukacs. Visconti himself saw it as a further examination of Verga’s characterizations and Gramsci’s analysis of the Southern social and political condition. In fact, Visconti consid- ered Rocco a sequel to La terra trema. Visconti’s critical realism takes the form of a study of each member of a Sicilian family of five sons and a mother (some characters receiving more emphasis than others) who have emigrated to the industrial Northern city of Milan. Each character responds to his or her situation in utterly different ways. Visconti thus achieved a complex structure that was to be attempted again by Bertolucci, one of his greatest admirers, in 1900. Originally Visconti conceived of the film as built around the mother, but the final film analysed more closely the two middle sons, Rocco and Simone, both of whom become boxers but have entirely opposite personalities. Simone is fierce and instinctual; Rocco is passive and thoughtful. Rocco sacri- fices himself, his love (Annie Girardot’s portrayal of Nadia was universally praised), and his dreams, for his brother and his family. The last scene is devoted to Ciro, the son who reaches political awareness, the only member of the family to become truly a part of the urban community. Ciro’s final speech to his younger brother reveals Visconti’s intention to ‘‘arrive at social and political conclusions, having taken during the film the road of psychological investigation and faithful reconstruction of a drama.’’ Visconti often had problems with the censors, and Rocco was no exception. During production he was forced to change a location because it was felt that to film Nadia’s death scene there would harm the tourist trade. At its world premiere in Venice, the film was projected with scenes cut and run with the soundtrack only. Many cuts were required before general release, and later the city of Milan refused to have it distributed there. The prints circulated in Italy run 45 minutes shorter than the original version. Nevertheless, Rocco was the first Visconti film to achieve enormous commercial success in its national market, and it convinced the film community that Visconti was indeed a major film director. For the most part, the film earned praise throughout the world, though a few critics abhorred the portrayal of violence and considered the film morally questionable. —Elaine Mancini THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW USA, 1975 Director: Jim Sharman Production: Twentieth Century-Fox; Eastmancolor, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Released 1975. The Rocky Horror Picture Show Producers: Michael White with John Goldstone; executive pro- ducer: Lou Adler; screenplay: Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien, from the play by O’Brien; photography: Peter Suschitzky; editors: Graeme Clifford; art director: Terry Ackland Snow; design consult- ant: Brian Thomson; songs: Richard O’Brien; music director: Richard Hartley; special effects: Wally Veevers; costume design- ers: Richard Pointing and Gillian Dods; costume consultant: Sue Blane. Cast: Tim Curry (Dr. Frank N. Furter); Barry Bostwick (Brad Majors); Susan Sarandon (Janet Weiss); Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff); Jonathan Adams (Dr. Everett Scott); Nell Campbell (Columbia); Peter Hinwood (Rocky); Meat Loaf (Eddie); Patricia Quinn (Ma- genta); Charles Gray (Narrator); Hilary Labow (Betty Munroe); Jeremy Newson (Ralph Hapschatt); Frank Lester (Wedding Dad); Mark Johnson (Wedding guest); Koo Stark, Petra Leah, and Gina Barrie (Bridesmaids); John Marquand (Father). Publications Books: Henkin, Bill, The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book, New York, 1979. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies, New York, 1983. Samuels, Stuart, Midnight Movies, New York, 1983. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOWFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1031 Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 26 October 1974. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1975. Listener (London), 28 August 1975. Stuart, A., in Films and Filming (London), September 1975. Pitman, J., in Variety (New York), 24 September 1975. Care, R., in Cinefantastique (Oak Park, Illinois), no. 2, 1976. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1976. Behar, H., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. ‘‘South Africa Bans Rocky Horror Pic,’’ in Variety (New York), 13 October 1976. Time Out (London), April 1979. Segell, M., ‘‘Rocky Horror: The Case of the Rampant Audience,’’ in Rolling Stone (New York), 5 April 1979. Baer, W., in Film und Ton (Munich), July 1979. Von Gunden, K., ‘‘The RH Factor,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1979. Bold, R., in Christian Century (Chicago), 12 September 1979. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘The Rocky Horror Picture Cult,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1980. Starburst (London), no. 36, 1981. Austin, B. A., ‘‘Portrait of a Cult Film Audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’’ in Journal of Communication (Philadelphia), Spring 1981. Screen International (London), July 1982. Schaefer, S., ‘‘Rocky X, Penny, and the Mylons,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1986. Studlar, G., ‘‘Midnight S/excess: Cult Configurations of ‘Femininity’ and the Perverse,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 17, no. 1 1989. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘‘Curse of the Cult People,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1991. Aviram, A. F., ‘‘Postmodern Gay Dionysus: Dr. Frank N. Furter,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), no. 3, 1992. Aknin, Laurent, ‘‘’I Was a Regular Frankie Fan’: Rocky Horror Picture Show, mode d’emploi,’’ in Vertigo (Paris), no. 10, 1993. Webb, C.H., ‘‘(Twenty) 20 Years Late to See The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 1995. ‘‘In a Time Warp,’’ in Newsweek, vol. 133, no. 3, 18 January 1999. *** Less interesting as cinema than as a social phenomenon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show began as a hit British fringe musical. Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show was first staged in 1973 at the Theatre Upstairs, with Tim Curry and O’Brien creating the roles of Frank N. Furter, bisexual transvestite mad scientist from another world, and Riff-Raff, Furter’s hunchbacked assistant. The Rocky Horror Picture Show arrived on screens in 1975 just after The Rocky Horror Show closed disastrously on Broadway, prompting 20th Century Fox to throw it away. Nevertheless, the film made a come- back as a midnight attraction across America, gaining an increasingly devoted following. The fancy-dress fanatics who patronize the film indulge in an unprecedented interaction with the on-screen events, interpolating new lines as footnotes to the dialogue (yelling ‘‘No Neck’’ every time Charles Gray appears, for instance), and challeng- ing the passive nature of the cinema-going experience. A write-off on its straight release, this midnight movie has been playing continu- ously for nearly 20 years, a rare cult movie whose cumulative earnings rank it financially with a mainstream first-run hit. Informed by O’Brien’s love for the arcana of 1950s American pop culture (rock ‘n’ roll, monster movies, Charles Atlas ads, rebel bikers), the show is filtered through a staid British sensibility (Ameri- cans can hardly be expected to recognize Gray’s criminologist as a parody of Edgar Lustgarten), unleashed by the rock opera conven- tions of Hair (which O’Brien and Curry had been in) and the early 1970s craze for androgynous glitter rock. Borrowing an archetypal plot (perhaps from Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, 1934; or Don Sharp’s disguised remake Kiss of the Vampire, 1964), the story opens with staunch hero Brad (Barry Bostwick) and virginal heroine Janet (Susan Sarandon) forced by a flat tire and a rainstorm to spend the night in a Middle American castle. They encounter a troupe of dancing aliens from the Planet Transylvania, and the fun-loving Dr. Frank N. Furter, who minces around in a basque and fishnet stockings belting out a torch song (‘‘I’m a Sweet Transvestite From Transsex- ual, Transylvania’’), creates a new-born beefcake monster Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood) for sexual purposes, and takes time to seduce both Janet and Brad. The liberated Janet has a fling with Rocky which, in a surprisingly conservative touch for such an abandoned produc- tion, brings disaster down as Frank goes out of control and has to be repressed by his puritanical servant Riff Raff. O’Brien’s catchy score is outstanding (the lyrics are especially clever) and the cast all have real attack (only Sarandon attempts subtlety), but the film is a less satisfying blend of horror pastiche and rock ‘n’ roll than Brian DePalma’s The Phantom of the Paradise (1974). DePalma uses a classical horror story to get inside the equivalent myths of rock as an industry and a cultural force, but Sharman and O’Brien just scatter train-spotterish references to Fa- mous Monsters of Filmland trivia (the first line, sung by a disembod- ied set of lips, is ‘‘Michael Rennie was ill the Day the Earth Stood Still. . . .’’) and scorchin’ rock numbers through a panto-level plot. While its audience might take The Rocky Horror Picture Show as an endorsement of polysexual liberation, with an enthusiastic if joky depiction of transvestism and homosexuality, the theme has mainly been included to make jokes at the expense of Alice Cooper and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust phase. Curry energetically makes a case for Frank, a camp icon over-the-top enough to be unthreatening, as a sympathetic libertarian, but the script has him as a Frankensteinian father who has created a child solely to molest him and, in a peevish moment, the casual murderer of a cast-off lover (Meat Loaf). The most honest emotional moment comes after the servant’s slaying of his master, as Riff Raff’s sister Magenta (Patricia Quinn) puzzles, ‘‘I thought you liked him . . . he liked you’’ only to have the hunchback, played by the real creator of Rocky Horror, howl ‘‘He never liked me!’’ The straining necessary to restage an intimate musical in a studio makes the film ragged at the edges: the camera doesn’t know where it should be in the dances, characters run about to little purpose, the action never strays from the old dark house, numbers end on awkward pauses for applause and feeble jokes (‘‘Do any of you know how to Madison?’’ Brad asks after ‘‘The Time Warp’’). These pauses invite the catcalls of the cultists, but they show up as dead spots when the film is seen on video or television or in a ‘‘straight’’ venue. The freakish nature of the film’s success is underlined by its creators’ inability, in the semi-sequel Shock Treatment (1981), to do it again. —Kim Newman ROMA, CITTà APERTA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1032 THE ROLE See BHUMIKA ROMA, CITTà APERTA (Rome, Open City) Italy, 1945 Director: Roberto Rossellini Production: Excelsa Film; black and white, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes; length 9,586 feet. Released September 1945, Rome. Filmed in part during the liberation of Rome by the Allies, the remainder shot during early 1944. Filmed in and around Rome, and in improvised studios at the ‘‘via degli Avignonesi’’ (Liborio Capitani) and at the home of Sergio Amidei. Screenplay: Sergio Amidei with Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini, from an original story by Sergio Amidei in collaboration with Alberto Consiglio and Roberto Rossellini; photography: Ubaldo Arata; editor: Eralda da Roma; production designer: R. Megna; music: Renzo Rossellini. Cast: Anna Magnani (Pina); Aldo Fabrizi (Don Pietro Pellegrini); Marcello Pagliero (Giorgio Manfredi, alias Luigi Ferraris); Harry Feist (Major Bergmann); Maria Michi (Marina Mari); Francesco Grandjaquet (Francesco, the typist); Giovanna Galletti (Ingrid); Vito Annichiarico (Marcello, son of Pina); Carla Revere (Lauretta); Nando Bruno (Agostino); Carlo Sindici (Treasurer from Rome); Joop van Hulzen (Hartmann); Akos Tolnay (Austrian deserter); Eduardo Passarelli (Police sergeant); Amalia Pelegrini (Landlady). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Best Film, 1946. Publications Script: Amidei, Sergio, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini, Open City, in Roberto Rossellino: The War Trilogy, edited by Stefano Roncoroni, New York, 1973; first published in Bologna, 1972. Books: Hovald, Patrice, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1958. Mida, Massimo, Roberto Rossellini, Parma, 1961. Verdone, Mario, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1963. Sarris, Andrew, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1967. Ivaldi, Nedo, La Resitenza nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra, Rome, 1970. Guarner, Jose Luis, Roberto Rossellini New York, 1970. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Wlaschin, Ken, Italian Cinema Since the War, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Baldelli, Pio, Roberto Rossellini, Rome, 1972. Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema, New York, 1972. Rondolino, Gianni, Roberto Rossellini, Florence, 1974. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Rossi, Philip C., A Rhetorical Analysis of Italian Neo-Realism in Roberto Rossellini’s ‘‘Rome, Open City,’’ Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1977. Ranvaud, Don, Roberto Rossellini, London 1981. Rossellini, Roberto, Le Cinéma Révélé, edited by Alain Bergala, Paris 1984. Hillier, Jim, editor, Cahiers du Cinéma 1: The 1950s: NeoRealism, Hollywood, New Wave, London, 1985. Serceau, Michel, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1986. Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini, Oxford, 1987. Gansera, Rainer, and others, Roberto Rossellini, Munich, 1987. Rossellini, Roberto, Il mio metodo: Scritti e intervisti, edited by Adriano Apra, Venice, 1987. Rossi, P., Roberto Rossellini: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Bondanella, Peter, Films of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1993. Rossellini, Roberto, My Method: Writings and Interviews, New York, 1995. Gallagher, Tag, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1998. Articles: Desternes, Jean, ‘‘Poesie et réalité,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), December 1946. Martin, Roland, in Bulletin de l’Idhec (Paris), March-May 1947. Ordway, Peter, ‘‘Prophet with Honor: Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Thea- tre Arts (New York), January 1949. ‘‘Rossellini,’’ in New Yorker, 19 February 1949. Venturi, Lauro, ‘‘Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Hollywood Quarterly, Fall 1949. Parri, Ferruccio, ‘‘Lo stil nuovo,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), April 1955. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘The Quest for Realism,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1957. Bazin, André, ‘‘Une Esthetique de la réalité: le Néo-Réalisme,’’ in Ou’estce que le cinéma, 2nd edition, Paris, 1962. Debreczeni, Francois, ‘‘Le Néo-Réalisme italien, bilan de la cri- tique,’’ in Etudes Cinématographique (Paris), nos. 32–35, 1964. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Rossellini Rediscovered,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 32, 1964. Casty, Alan, ‘‘The Achievement of Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Film Comment New York, Fall 1964. ‘‘Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Fall 1971. MacBean, J. R., ‘‘Rossellini’s Materialist Mise-en-Scène,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1971–72. Walsh, M., ‘‘Rome, Open City: The Rise to Power of Louis XIV,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), no. 15, 1977. Heijs, J., in Skrien (Amsterdam), October 1977. Lawton, B., ‘‘Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction of Reality,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. ROMA, CITTà APERTAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1033 Roma, città aperta Burgoyne, Robert, ‘‘The Imaginary and the Neo-Real,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1979. Veillon, O. R., in Cinématographe (Paris), June 1980. ‘‘Le Neo-Réalisme Issue’’ of Cahiers Lumières (Paris), Novem- ber 1980. Mitchell, T., ‘‘The Construction and Reception of Anna Magnani in Italy and the English-Speaking World, 1945–1988,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 1, 1989. Kramer, R., ‘‘Pouvoir des images, mission du cinema,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 443/444, May sup 1991. Wagstaff, Chris, ‘‘True Stories,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 8, August 1993. Chase, D., ‘‘Anna Magnani: Miracle Worker,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1993. Denby, David, ‘‘Naples, Open City,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), no. 1, September 1994. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 179, July-August 1995. Simels, Steve, ‘‘Open City,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, no. 295, 6 October 1995. Brunette, P., ‘‘The Neo Bible,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 40, 17 October 1995. Orr, C., ‘‘Pasolini’s Accattone, or Naturalism and Its Discontents,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 3, 1995. Fisher, J., ‘‘Deleuze in a Ruinous Context: German Rubble-Film and Italian Neorealism,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 23, Spring 1997. *** Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta emerged from the ashes of World War II to become Europe’s first post-war masterpiece, and in doing so demonstrated once again an increasingly accepted axiom of filmmaking: cinema is perhaps the only one of the major art forms in which scarcity and deprivation periodically unite with genius to produce technical innovations that drastically influence the course of the art form for generations to follow. For example, the filmless experiments (caused by scarcities of film stock) of the Soviet Union’s Kuleshow workshop, between 1922 and 1924, produced the concept of montage and led to the great works of Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Somewhat earlier, in Germany, director Robert Wiene utilized painted backdrops and shadowy lighting induced by a power failure to create The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and popularize the film style known as Expressionism. Similarly, Rossellini, trying LA RONDE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1034 to produce a film in 1945 with fragments left from an industry decimated by war, pioneered a style that became known as neo- realism, the influence of which can still be seen in films as diverse as Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Roma, città aperta, which was begun within two months of the Allied liberation of Rome, was actually conceived and planned several months earlier when Rossellini and some colleagues were dodging Nazi patrols to avoid being conscripted for military service on the side of the Fascists. In a purely professional sense, the attempt to make the film itself should have been doomed: Rossellini could obtain a permit from the allied administrators to make a documentary film only, and the prohibitive cost of the sound film on the black market virtually mandated the use of cheaper stock normally reserved for silent films. In addition, all of the performers with the exception of Anna Magnani, a sometime music hall performer, were non- professionals. The resulting film, unlike anything produced before, turned these seeming drawbacks into tenets of a major new mode of expression— neo-realism—which shook the Italian film industry from its doldrums and returned it to the forefront of cinematic innovation. But, Roma, città aperta’s employment of this mode of representation was not the end product of the application of conscious artistic principle in the manner of the less influential Ossessione (1943), which many feel was the real harbinger of neo-realism. Rossellini’s version of the form placed heavy emphasis on the re-creation of incidents in, whenever possible, the exact locales in which such events had taken place and accordingly spotlighted the everyday occurrences of Italian life. It also featured real people in the actors’ roles which served to convey a sense of the immediacy of the post-war Italian experience. Yet, several features of Roma, città aperta make it difficult to classify its director as simply or purely a neo-realist, particularly given the way that the form was subsequently defined by such filmmakers as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and others who took up the style in the late 1940s. Its plot is highly melodramatic in the worst sense of the word. Characters are clearly defined as either good or evil according to the strength of their commitment to a better tomorrow for Italy or, conversely, by their lack of faith in themselves and their cynicism in adhering to an obviously corrupt ideology. Rossellini makes little pretence at objectivity in rendering even the surface appearance of things which characterized later neo- realistic works. His employment of his brother Renzo’s music is emotionally manipulative in a number of scenes, while, in other instances, certain images represent a definite intrusion of the direc- tor’s personal feelings. His use of babies and children, for example, as an embodiment of Italy’s hopes for the future not only shapes our anguish in a scene such as the one in which pregnant Anna Magnani is murdered but it also reaffirms the validity of the sacrifice and the Italian cause in the final scene when the children are neatly juxtaposed with a shot of the dome of St. Peter’s as they leave the execution of the priest Don Pietro. Although these overly dramatic inconsistencies make if difficult to classify Roma, città aperta as a textbook example of the mode of expression it popularized, such contradictions actually heighten its powerful depiction of the conflicting realities inherent in the struggle against fascism. Rossellini’s shifting perspectives alternating be- tween comedy and pathos when focused upon a select number of crucial episodes in the lives of some real people effectively isolates a specific historical reality that exerted a profound effect upon filmgoers of the late 1940s. Though the grainy, black-and-white images of Roma, città aperta are at least one step removed from actuality, conforming instead to a verity appropriate to documentary films, they promulgate a very real social humanism that pervades the entire body of Rossellini’s work and transcends the narrow boundaries of specific modes of expres- sion. The film is ultimately a hopeful vision of the future of Italy and indeed of mankind in general, and while it establishes techniques that would subsequently evolve into filmmaking codes, it reflects more the personality of its director and his belief in innate goodness than it does a rigid ideology of realistic representation. —Stephen L. Hanson LA RONDE France, 1950 Director: Max Ophüls Production: Saint-Maurice; black and white, 35mm; running time: 97 minutes; length: 2,600 meters. Released 17 June 1950, Paris. Filmed 23 January 1950–18 March 1950 in Saint-Maurice studios. Producer: Sacha Gordine; screenplay: Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls, from the play Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler; photography: La Ronde LA RONDEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1035 Christian Matras; editor: Leonide Azar; sound operator: Pierre Calvet; production designer: Jean d’Eaubonne; music: Oscar Straus; costume designer: Georges Annenkov. Cast: Anton Walbrook (Master of Ceremonies); Simone Signoret (Léocardie, the prostitute); Serge Reggiani (Franz, the soldier); Simone Simon (Marie, the chambermaid); Jean Clarieux (Sergeant); Daniel Gélin (Alfred, the young man); Robert Vattier (Professor Schuller); Danielle Darrieaux (Emma Breitkopf); Fernand Gravey (Charles); Odette Joyeux (Working girl); Marcel Merovee (Toni); Jean-Louis Barrault (Robert Kühlenkampf); Isa Miranda (Charlotte, the comedienne); Charles Vissiere (Theatre manager); Gerard Philipe (Count); Jean Ozenne, Jean Landier, Rene Marjac, and Jacques Vertan (Silhouettes). Publications Script: Ophüls, Max, and Jacques Natanson, La Ronde, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 April 1963; in Masterworks of the French Cinema, London, 1974. Books: Roud, Richard, Max Ophüls: An Index, London, 1958. Annekov, Georges, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1962. Ophüls, Max, Max Ophüls par Max Ophüls, Paris, 1963. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls. Paris, 1963. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1976. Willemen, Paul, editor, Ophüls, London, 1978. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Williams, Alan, Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire, New York, 1980. Horton, Andrew, and Jan Magretta, editors, Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, New York, 1981. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1984. Tassone, Aldo, Max Ophüls, l’enchanteur, Torino, 1994. White, Susan M., The Cinema of Max Ophüls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of a Woman, New York, 1995. Articles: Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with Ophüls,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don) July 1950. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Ophüls and the Romantic Tradition,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven), no. 17, 1956. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘De l’amour de l’art à l’art de l’amour,’’ in Avant Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 April 1963. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘Max Ophüls,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma (Paris), June 1965. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Max Ophüls,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Williams, A., ‘‘The Circles of Desire: Narration and Representation in La Ronde,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1973. Camper, Fred, ‘‘Distance and Style: The Visual Rhetoric of Max Ophüls,’’ in Monogram (London), no. 5, 1974. Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with Ophüls (1950),’’ in Masterworks of the French Cinema, edited by John Weightman, New York, 1974. ‘‘Ophüls Issues’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), November and Decem- ber 1977. Wyndham, F., in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1982. Shipman, David, in Films and Filming (London), May 1982. Thomas, D., in Movie (London), Summer 1982. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 456, January 1990. Ophuls, Marcel, ‘‘La Ronde et le droit d’auteur,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 347, January 1990. Piazzo, Philippe, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), no. 200, March-April 1990. Amiel, Vincent, ‘‘La scène, primitive,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 350, April 1990. Alter, Maria P., ‘‘From Der Reigen to La Ronde: Transposition of a Stageplay to the Cinema,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 24, no.1, January 1996. *** With La Ronde, Max Ophüls returned home—to France, his adopted country, and in subject matter to Vienna, his spiritual home. After nine years of uneasy exile in America, the film marks the opening of the last, finest phase of his peripatetic career. Its mood of consummate artifice is established in the very first shot. In one long, unbroken take Anton Walbrook, dressed as an elegant man-about- town, strolls on to a sound stage, past lighting equipment, backdrops, and other paraphernalia, chatting urbanely to camera the while; hangs up hat, scarf and cape, wanders into the set of a small lamplit square, in which stands a carousel; steps on to it and—as Simone Signoret’s prostitute emerges from the shadows—starts the mechanism. The merry-go-round of love is under way. ‘‘Passion without love, pleasure without love, love without recip- rocation’’—these, according to Truffaut and Rivette, are the themes that engaged Ophüls, and certainly they sum up La Ronde. Each of his chain of characters pursues or is pursued, exploits or is exploited, loves or is not loved, as the carousel turns; and each encounter centres around the act, or the acting, of love. Schnitzler’s play Reigen furnished the basis of the film, but his bleak cynicism is transmuted by Ophüls into a bitter-sweet irony, viewed through a haze of poetic nostalgia. Schnitzler intended his play as a metaphor for the transmis- sion of venereal disease; the film scarcely lends itself to any such reading. The film, like the play, is set in the Vienna of 1900: present actuality for Schnitzler (though the play’s first public performance was not until 1921), but for Ophüls a romantic, fairy-tale city, stylised and charmingly unreal. To the tune of Oscar Straus’s insidious waltz, the infinitely fluid camera which Ophüls made his own leads through an opulent world of boudoirs, cafés, misty streets and chambres privées, as each puppet-character repeats the same words, the same gestures, with different partners, at once deceiving and self-deceived. Only the master of ceremonies, the director’s alter ego, is granted freedom, able to range through time and identity, proteanly appearing as waiter or coachman to nudge the action on its way, or share an epigram with the audience. Walbrook’s subtle, delicate performance, gracefully avoiding the least hint of pretentiousness, holds the centre of the film, while around him circles a dazzling array of the finest ROOM AT THE TOP FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1036 acting talent of the period: Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Danielle Darrieux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gérard Philipe (the latter two, admittedly, not quite at their best). La Ronde was Ophüls’s most successful, and most widely distrib- uted, film. To audiences everywhere, especially in Britain and North America, it represented the epitome of everything witty, sophisticated and elegant: quintessentially French and Viennese at once. The Oscar Straus waltz became a popular hit. For some years the film was unavailable, due to legal complications, and Vadim’s meretricious remake of 1964 offered a distinctly poor substitute. The Ophüls version resurfaced early in the 1980s, its reputation enhanced by its long absence, and proved as stylish and compelling as ever in its exposition of the director’s perennial theme: the gulf between the ideal of love and its imperfect, transient reality. —Philip Kemp ROOM AT THE TOP UK, 1958 Director: Jack Clayton Production: Romulus Films, Ltd.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 115 minutes. Released 1958, Britain. Room at the Top Producers: John and James Woolf; screenplay: Neil Paterson, from the novel by John Braine; photography: Freddie Francis; edi- tor: Ralph Kemplen; art director: Ralph Brinton; music: Mario Nascimbene. Cast: Laurence Harvey (Joe Lampton); Simone Signoret (Alice Aisgill); Heather Sears (Susan Brown); Donald Houston (Charles Soames); Donald Wolfit (Mr. Brown); Hermione Baddeley (Elspeth); John Westbrook (Jack Wales). Awards: British Academy Awards for Best Film, Best British Film, and Best Foreign Actress (Signoret), 1958; Cannes Film Festival, Best Actress (Signoret), 1959; Oscars for Best Actress (Signoret) and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, 1959. Publications Books: Manvell, Roger, New Cinema in Britain, New York, 1969. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, New York, 1971. Betts, Ernest, The Film Business—A History of British Cinema: 1896–1972, New York, 1973. Perry, George, The Great British Picture Show, New York, 1974. Walker, Alexander, Hollywood U.K., New York, 1974. Hickey, Des, and Gus Smith, The Prince . . . Laurence Harvey, London, 1975. Gaston, Georg, Jack Clayton: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1981. Sandre, Didier, Simone Signoret, Paris, 1981. Hill, John, Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema 1956–63, Lon- don, 1986. Articles: Dyer, Peter John, in Films and Filming (London), February 1959. Houston, Penelope, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1959. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 29 April 1959. Fitzpatrick, Ellen, in Films in Review (New York), May 1959. Alexander, A. J., in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1961. Kael, Paulin, ‘‘Commitment and Strait Jacket,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley) Fall 1961. ‘‘Laurence Harvey: Following My Actor’s Instinct,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1961. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Clayton’s Progress,’’ in Motion (London), Spring 1962. Signoret, Simone, ‘‘On Being under a Director’s Spell,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1962. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘The Face of 63: Britain,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1963. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘Laurence Harvey.’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), May 1964. Gregory, C. T., ‘‘There’ll Always Be Room at the Top for Nothing But the Best,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), Winter 1973. Donaldson, Leslie, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. A ROOM WITH A VIEWFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1037 Philbert, B., in Cinématographe (Paris), September 1982. Cluny, C. M., in Cinéma (Paris), October 1982. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Image et Son, November 1982. Combs, Richard, ‘‘Upward Mobility,’’ in Listener, vol. 114, no. 2931, 17 October 1985. Palmer, R.B., ‘‘What Was New in the British New Wave?: Re- viewing Room at the Top,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 14, no. 3, Fall 1986. Ward, L.E., ‘‘The Great Films: Some Came Running and Room at the Top,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 168, June 1989. *** From post-war Britain emerged the syndrome of the angry young man, one apparently intent on overthrowing established social con- ventions and codes of behavior. In the theatre, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger set the pace; in fiction, John Braine’s Room at the Top. With Jack Clayton’s film of the Braine novel, the syndrome became known internationally to film audiences, its central character, Joe Lampton, becoming the epitome of the restless young Englishman fed up with social traditions that made life forever one situated in the lower or middle class. In this his feature film debut, Clayton displayed a feeling for atmosphere and character delineation that made this study of social, political and sexual behavior one of the most significant and success- ful British films of the 1950s. Its failure to receive Code approval in the United States only increased its popularity, confirming the notion that the film-going public was ready for more mature films, films that involved a more realistic portrait of current social and sexual realities. Having spent three years as a prisoner of war, Joe Lampton decides that he is owed more than slavery for his wartime duties and thus he seeks to break through the rigid provincial social structure of the industrial town of Warnley. Convinced that ability is not the key to advancement, he sets his sights on marriage to Susan Brown, the daughter of a local industrialist and community leader. The more his status-seeking is discouraged, the more actively he pursues his goals, bribery, public embarrassment, and removal of the object of affection all failing to curtail Joe’s activities. Almost from the beginning it is clear that Joe’s love is not for Susan but for the status she will provide. Ever the opportunist, Joe takes advantage of the disastrous marital situation of Alice Aisgill, the leading lady of the village theatre group, and before long they are lovers. Alice falls in love; Joe continues to place his priorities on money and status. When Susan returns from her father-induced exile, Joe seduces her, subsequently realizing that while he desires what Susan can provide, his love is for Alice. Joe, however, must pay for his crime. When Susan becomes pregnant, her father attempts to bribe Joe, offering to set him up in business if he agrees never to see Susan again, and, when that fails, forcing him to marry Susan and agree never to see Alice again. Joe now finds himself caught in the web he has constructed, realizing too late that his freedom from social structures is not a function of money and status but of self, that before he can be outwardly free he must be inwardly free. His room at the top may be lined with gold, but the achievement of that position ensures not happiness but misery. The ending of this film is a bitter parody of the conventional happy ending: a two-shot situates the wedding couple, she in her joy, he in his misery, the tightness of the frame depicting the restrictiveness of Joe’s new social position. The success of Room at the Top set in motion a new genre of British cinema, the ‘‘kitchen sink drama’’ with its emphasis on social realism. Over the next five years such strong examples as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life won international acclaim. —Doug Tomlinson A ROOM WITH A VIEW UK, 1986 Director: James Ivory Production: A Room with a View Productions; Technicolor, Dolby Stereo; running time: 117 minutes; length: 10,501 feet. Released January 1986. Cost: ￡2,000,000. Producer: Ismail Merchant; screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from the novel by E. M. Forster; photography: Tony-Pierce Roberts; second unit photography: Sergio Melaranci; editor: Humphrey Dixon; sound editors: Tony Lenny, Peter Compton, Alan Killick; sound recordists: Ray Beckett, Brian Masterson; sound re-recordist: Richard King; production designers: Gianni Quaranta, Brian Ackland- Snow; art directors: Brian Savegar, Elio Altamura; costume design: Jenny Beavan, John Bright; music: Richard Robbins; musical direc- tors: Francis Shaw, Barrie Guard. Cast: Maggie Smith (Charlotte Bartlett); Helena Bonham-Carter (Lucy Honeychurch); Denholm Elliot (Mr. Emerson); Julian Sands (George Emerson); Daniel Day-Lewis (Cecil Vyse); Simon Cal- low (Reverend Arthur Beebe); Judi Dench (Miss Eleanor Lavish); Rosemary Leach (Mrs. Honeychurch); Rupert Graves (Freddy Honeychurch); Patrick Godfrey (Mr. Eager); Fabia Drake (Catherine Alan); Joan Henley (Teresa Alan); Maria Britneva (Mrs. Vyse); Amanda Walker (The Cockney Signora); Peter Cellier (Sir Harry Otway); Mia Fothergill (Minnie Beebe); Patricia Lawrence (Mrs. Butterworth); Mirio Guidelli (Santa Croce Guide); Matyelock Gibbs and Kitty Aldridge (The New Charlotte and Lucy); Freddy Korner (Mr. Floyd); Elizabeth Marangoni (Miss Pole); Lucca Rossi (Phae- ton); Isabella Celani (Persephone); Luigi Di Fiori (Murdered Youth). Awards: Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, 1986. BAFTA Awards for Best Film, Best Actress (Smith), Best Supporting Actress (Dench), 1986. Publications Books: Pym, John, The Wandering Company: Twenty-One Years of Mer- chant Ivory Films, London, 1983. Long, Robert Emmet, The Films of Merchant Ivory, New York, 1991, 1997. Pym, John, Merchant Ivory’s English Landscape: Rooms, Views, and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, New York, 1995. A ROOM WITH A VIEW FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1038 A Room with a View Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 29 January 1986. Variety (New York), 29 January 1986. Johnston, Sheila, in Stills (London), April 1986. Strick, Philip, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1986. Sigal, Clancy, in Listener (London), 17 April 1986. Mayne, R., in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1986. Anderson, P., in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1986. McFarlane, Brian, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), July 1986. Magny, Joel, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1986. Pierce-Roberts, Tony, in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), April 1987. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1987. Levine, J. P., ‘‘Two Rooms with a View: An Inquiry into Film Adaptation,’’ in Mosaic (Washington, D.C.), no. 3, 1989. LeMahieu, D. L., ‘‘Imagined Contemporaries: Cinematic and Tele- vised Dramas about the Edwardians in Great Britain and the United States, 1967–1985,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon, Oxfordshire), no. 3, 1990. Kaaber, L., ‘‘Forster pa film,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Fall 1992. Hipsky, M., ‘‘Anglophil(m)ia: Why Does America Watch Merchant- Ivory Movies?,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 22, no. 3, 1994. Chambers, L, ‘‘Fade In,’’ in The Journal: Writers Guild of America, West (Los Angeles), vol. 8, December/January 1995. *** During a visit to Florence in 1907 with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy Honeychurch meets the bohemian Mr. Emerson and his son George. During the course of a country outing George makes a pass at Lucy, who rebuffs him. The incident is seen by Charlotte, and both women return to England before the allotted end of their stay. Back home in the village of Summer Street with her mother and brother Lucy becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse. At the same time the Emersons rent a cottage in the area and, through becoming friendly with Lucy’s brother, George is soon a regular guest at the Honeychurch home. He again attempts to seduce Lucy, who tells him to leave. However, she begins to realise that she is attracted to George, breaks off her engagement with Cecil, and she and George return to Florence on their honeymoon. ROSEMARY’S BABYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1039 The theme of Forster’s second novel—the counterpoint between uncomplicated Mediterranean passions and the stultifying, hypocriti- cal restrictions of Edwardian social order—fits in particularly com- fortably with one of the favourite subjects of the remarkably unified and consistent Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala oeuvre, namely the clash of conflicting cultures, be they based on race, class, or generational differences—witness Shakespeare Wallah, The Europeans, The Bos- tonians, and Heat and Dust. But, above all else, A Room with a View stands out as a re-creation of the Indian summer of Edwardian England—quite an achievement considering the diverse origins of producer, director, and screenplay writer. Significantly (and courage- ously) even the Florentine scenes are not milked for all their consider- able visual worth; rather, the film concentrates on the relations between the English visitors to Florence and the various goings-on at the Pensione Bertolini, faithfully reflecting its characters’ blinkered, insular sensibilities. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that, as a reflection on ‘‘Englishness,’’ the film, like the novel, does not stray beyond the bounds of lightly critical satire and affectionately observed comedy of manners. Like so many of its ilk on both film and television A Room with a View is decidedly ambivalent about the England which it portrays—one eye cocked at the oppressive effeteness of the Edwardian upper and middle classes, the other captivated by all those ravishing country walks and languorous games of tennis. It is almost certainly these latter elements which have made the film such a commercial success (not least outside Britain) along, of course, with a particularly impressive display of acting skills. Again, one might be critical of the British cinema’s over-reliance on essentially theatrical performers and performances but on the other hand it would miss half the point of the film to ignore Maggie Smith’s Charlotte, Lucy’s spinster chap- eron who has clearly got enough ‘‘nous’’ to realise, and regret, what she has missed in life, and who eventually connives at Lucy’s affair with George; or Daniel Day-Lewis’s Cecil, a prissy wimp who is as different to the actor’s earlier incarnation as a punk in My Beautiful Laundrette as it is possible to imagine. In the last analysis, however, it’s hard not to apply Forster’s comment on his novel—‘‘clear and bright and well constructed but so thin’’—to this beautifully made but ultimately rather gossamer- like film. —Julian Petley ROSEMARY’S BABY USA, 1968 Director: Roman Polanski Production: William Castle Enterprises for Paramount Pictures; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 137 minutes. Released 12 June 1968, New York. Filmed on location in New York City and Playa del Rey, California. Producers: William Castle with Dona Holloway; screenplay: Roman Polanski, from the novel by Ira Levin; photography: William Fraker; editors: Sam O’Steen and Robert Wyman; sound recordists: Harold Rosemary’s Baby Lewis and John Wilkinson; production designer: Richard Sylbert; art director: Joel Schiller; music: Krzysztof Komeda; costume designer: Anthea Sylbert; makeup: Allan Snyder. Cast: Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse); John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse); Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevet); Sidney Blackmere (Roman Castevet); Maurice Evans (Hutch); Ralph Bellamy (Dr. Sapirstein); Angela Dorian (Terry); Patsy Kelly (Laura-Louise); Elisha Cook (Mr. Nicklas); Emmaline Henry (Elsie Dunstan); Marianne Gordon (Joan Jellico); Philip Leeds (Doctor Shand); Charles Grodin (Dr. Hill); Hanna Landy (Grace Cardiff); Hope Summers (Mrs. Gordon); Wende Wagner (Tiger); Gordon Connell (Guy’s agent); Janet Garland (Nurse); Joan Reilly (Pregnant woman); Tony Curtis (Voice of Donald Baumgart); William Castle (Man at telephone booth). Award: Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Gordon), 1968. Publications Books: Butler, Ivan, The Cinema of Roman Polanski, New York, 1970. Kane, Pascal, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1970. Belmans, Jacques, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1971. Kaminsky, Stuart, American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974. ROSEMARY’S BABY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1040 Crouch, William P., Satanism and Possession in Selected Contempo- rary Novels and their Cinematic Adaptations, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1977. Bisplinghoff, Gretchen, and Virginia Wexman, Roman Polanski: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Kiernan, Thomas, The Roman Polanski Story, New York, 1980. Leaming, Barbara, Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biogra- phy, New York 1981, as Polanski: His Life and Films, Lon- don, 1982. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981. Fischer, Jens Malte, Filmwissenschaft—Filmgeschichte: Studien zu Welles, Hitchcock, Polanski, Pasolini, and Max Steiner, Tübingen, 1983. Polanski, Roman, Roman, London, 1984. Dokumentation: Polanski und Skolimowski; Das Absurde im Film, Zurich, 1985. Wexman, Virginia Wright, Roman Polanski, Boston, 1985. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and others, Roman Polanski, Munich, 1986. Avron, Dominique, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1987. Bruno, Edoardo, Roman Polanski, Rome, 1993. Parker, John, Polanski, London, 1993. Stachówna, Grazyna, Roman Pola’nski I jego filmy, Warsaw, 1994. Cappabianca, Alessandro, Roman Polanski, Recco, 1997. Articles: Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 15 June 1968. Hamilton, Jack, in Look (Des Moines), 25 June 1968. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 25 July 1968. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), August-Septem- ber 1968. Ellison, Harlan, in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Fall 1968. Engle, Harrison, in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1968. Kinder, Marsha, and Beverle Houston, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1968–69. McArthur, Colin, ‘‘Polanski,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1968–69. Ross, T. J., ‘‘Roman Polanski, Repulsion, and the New Mythology,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1968–69. Reisner, Joel, and Bruce Kane, ‘‘An Interview with Roman Polanski,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), no. 2, 1969. Ciment, Michel, and others ‘‘Entretien avec Roman Polanski,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1969. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), March 1969. Chappetta, Robert, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1969. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Satisfaction: A Most Unpleasant Feeling,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1969. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Still Legion, Still Decent,’’ in Commonweal (New York), 23 May 1969. McCarty, John Alan, ‘‘The Polanski Puzzle,’’ in Take One (Montr- eal), May-June 1969. Bradbury, Ray, ‘‘A New Ending to Rosemary’s Baby,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1969. Leach, J., ‘‘Notes on Polanski’s Cinema of Cruelty,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 2, no.1, 1978. Amiel, M., and others, ‘‘L’Univers de Roman Polanski,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), February 1980. Jankun, M., in Kino (Warsaw), April 1985. Bergendy, P., ‘‘Az orvos valaszol,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), no. 4, 1989. Razlogov, K., and I. Levin, ‘‘Rebenok Rozmari,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 11, 1989. Berenstein, R., ‘‘Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby and Mothering,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), no. 2, 1990. Alion, Y., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 476, November 1991. Fischer, L., ‘‘Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 3, 1992. Marcus, S., ‘‘Placing Rosemary’s Baby,’’ in Differences, vol. 5, no. 3, 1993. Landrot, Marine, ‘‘La beauté du diable,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2295, 5 January 1994. Joly, Martine, ‘‘Architecture et cinéma: une recontre parfois magique,’’ in CinémAction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), no. 75, April 1995. Diski, Jenny, ‘‘Sitting Inside,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 4, April 1995. Indiana, G., ‘‘Bedeviled,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 40, 29 August 1995. *** Based on Ira Levin’s 1967 best-selling novel of the same name, Rosemary’s Baby, in Roman Polanski’s hands becomes a multi- layered, seminal horror film that exposes collective subconscious fears and cultural anxieties. Satanism and motherhood are only the obvious starting points of inquiry for Polanski, whose body of work includes complex psychological studies such as Knife In The Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul De Sac (1966), Chinatown (1974), and The Tenant (1976). Polanski’s penchant for inverting and subverting clichés serves him particularly well in telling this story of modern city living juxtaposed against ancient rites of witchcraft and devil worship. The paradoxes, dualities, and contrasts are immediately apparent from the film’s title sequence as the camera moves slowly across a bright, contemporary New York city skyline, finally coming to rest on an ominous and dark building of old-world style and construction. The ancient looking apartment building, so out of time and place, is called the Bramford, and is every bit as much a character in the story as Rosemary’s baby itself. Though working from his own screenplay, Polanski has commented that Rosemary’s Baby was ‘‘less personal’’ than other films because it didn’t begin as his own project. Yet he managed to integrate his themes of paranoia, alienation, identity confusion, and ‘‘otherness’’ so effectively as to make Rosemary’s Baby an important work in his oeuvre. The unexpected success of his film adaptation of Levin’s book initiated an entire genre of similarly themed ‘‘devil/child’’ horror films, including The Exorcist and The Omen. Rosemary’s Baby started a trend in popular movies which succeeded in tapping into a collective subconscious fear of all things Satanic. A newly wed, self-described ‘‘country girl at heart’’ from Amer- ica’s heartland is drawn unsuspecting, into a possibly occult web of conspiracies when she and her husband move into the Bramford and become entangled in its dark history. Mia Farrow, as first-time mother, Rosemary Woodhouse, gives the character a remarkable childlike frailty coupled with surprising strength, making it easy for the audience to identify with her predicament. Unlike Levin’s book, in which the religiosity is clear-cut, Polanski depicts Rosemary’s ROSEMARY’S BABYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1041 plight as an ongoing balancing act between fearful fantasy and stark reality. In his autobiography, Roman, Polanski explains: The (Levin) book was an outstandingly well-constructed thriller, and I admired it as such. Being an agnostic, however, I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate than I believed in a personal God; the whole idea conflicted with my rational view of the world. For credibility’s sake, I decided that there would have to be a loophole: the possibility that Rosemary’s supernatural experiences were figments of her imagination. The entire story, as seen through her eyes could have been a chain of only superficially sinister coincidences, a prod- uct of her feverish fancies. Using pregnancy as a device—a hormonal, physical change that alters both the mind and the body—Polanski provokes his audience with situations that question the mind/body dichotomy, the nature of good and evil (God and Devil), the instinct for survival, and the ultimate essence of motherhood. These questions give Polanski’s treatment of the material an ambiguous, open-ended and surreal edge which he masterfully exploits. The audience is forced to ask, ‘‘How can something ancient and unholy exist in this peppy and bright young couple’s world?’’ Rosemary continuously sinks into a night- mare of shadows, symbols, and whispers that keep her—and the audience—questioning her sanity. Did she dream or hallucinate a demonic rape? Could there really be a coven of witches living in the Bramford? Rosemary’s main motivation from the beginning of the film is the desire to have a child, and this propels her into the diabolical plot that seems to be taking shape around her. She even unwittingly offers that she is of ‘‘fertile stock’’ when describing her family to her nosy, elderly, and suspiciously friendly neighbor, Minnie Castevet. Before long, Minnie and her husband—named Roman—have insinuated themselves into the Woodhouse’s lives, and especially Rosemary’s pregnancy. As the joy of her pregnancy slowly turns to fear, we begin to understand what an outsider Rosemary has been all along. In a sense, she is a double outsider and this provides Polanski with the essentials for a protagonist with which he can readily identify. Transplanted from Omaha, Nebraska, Rosemary is not nearly as worldly or cosmopolitan as her new husband. Guy, a struggling actor from Baltimore, is completely at home in the big city, while Rose- mary merely attempts to adapt. Secondly, Rosemary is an outsider in the mysterious Bramford. She is naive and open, while the Bramford is sly and full of secrets. She is unlike anyone else in the apartment building, whose tenants all seem to be over fifty. The one woman her age, that she meets in the basement laundry, soon winds up a suicide on the sidewalk. The feelings of aloneness and alienation that Rosemary is experi- encing only escalate with her pregnancy. She is an ‘‘Alice’’ gone ‘‘Through the Looking Glass’’ of her own body. As her body grows, so does her paranoia and her separation from the world she once knew. Rosemary works frantically to put the pieces together and solve the mystery that threatens her life and the life inside her. Polanski wants us to feel her victimization at the hands of everyone she trusts. As viewers, men and women alike are unsettled by the dilemma of this soon-to-be mother. Her peril resonates strongly the mother-child bond that lies deep within us all. After giving birth, Rosemary is told that the baby has died, despite the sounds of an infant crying in the distance. By solidly identifying with Rosemary’s manipulation, whether real or imagined, the audience expects a resolution. But, in the end, instead of typical Hollywood cathartic vengeance, we are left with more questions. Did Rosemary have a complete mental breakdown, or did the Devil actually take human form and impregnate an unsuspecting, drugged, Manhattan housewife? The final shot in the film is of Rosemary surrounded by the coven as she feels herself drawn to her crying child. Will she follow an impulse to comfort, or kill the infant? By reintroducing the opening lullaby over a close-up of Rosemary’s smiling face, Polanski slyly suggests that only mother- hood is real, and a more powerful magic than evil. With the lullaby taking over the scene, the close-up dissolves into an exterior shot of the Bramford and we are back, full circle, where we began. —Ralph Anthony Valdez ROUGE See YANZHI KOU RULES OF THE GAME See RèGLE DU JEU THE RUNNER See DAWANDEH 1043 S THE SACRIFICE See OFFRET SAIKAKA ICHIDAI ONNA (The Life of Oharu) Japan, 1952 Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Production: Shintoho; black and white, 35mm; running time: 148 minutes originally, cut to 133 minutes; length: 13,339 feet originally, cut to 11,970 feet. Released 1952. Producers: Hideo Koi, Yoshikata Yoda, and Kenji Mizoguchi; screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda and Kenji Mizoguchi, from the novel Saikaku Ichidai Onna Koshuku ichidai onna by Saikaku Ihara; photography: Yoshimi Hirano; editor: Toshio Goto; art director: Hiroshi Mizutani; music: Ichiro Saito; historical consultant: Isamu Yoshi. Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka (Oharu); Toshiro Mifune (Katsunosuke); Hisako Yamane (Lady Matsudaira); Yuriko Hamada (Yoshioka); Tsukie Matsura (Tomo, Oharu’s mother); Ichiro Sugai (Shinzaemon, Oharu’s father); Toshiaki Konoe (Lord Tokitaka Matsudaira); Jukichi Uno (Yakichi Senya); Eitaro Shindo (Kohei Sasaya); Akira Oizumi (Fumikichi, Sasaya’s friend); Masao Shimizu (Kikuno Koji); Daisuke Kato (Tasaburo Hishiya); Toranosuke Ogawa (Yataemon Isobei); Eijiro Yanagi (Daimo Enaka); Hiroshi Oizumi (Manager Bunkichi); Haruo Ichikawa (Iwabashi); Kikue Mori (Myokai, the old nun); Chieko Hagashiyama; Sadako Sawamura. Awards: Venice Film Festival, International Prize, 1952. Publications Books: Anderson, Joseph, and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Rutland, Vermont, 1960; revised edition, Princeton, 1982. Ve-Ho, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1963. Connaissance de Mizoguchi, Paris, 1965. Mesnil, Michel, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1965. Tessier, Max, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1971. Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Kenji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, New York, 1976. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Garbicz, Adam, and Jacek Klinowski, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Il cinema di Kenji Mizoguchi, Venice, 1980. Freiberg, Freda, Women in Mizoguchi Films, Melbourne, 1981. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Serceau, Daniel, Mizoguchi: De la revolte aux songes, Paris, 1983. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. McDonald, Keiko, Mizoguchi, Boston, 1984. O’Grady, Gerald, editor, Mizoguchi the Master, Ontario, 1996. Tomasi, Dario, Kenji Mizoguchi, Milano, 1998. Articles: Bazin, André, in France Observateur (Paris), February 1954. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 11 February 1954. Demonsablon, Philippe, ‘‘Qui naquit à Newgate. . . ,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1954. SAIKAKA ICHIDAI ONNA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1044 Richie, Donald, and Joseph Anderson, ‘‘Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1955. Marcorelles, Louis, ‘‘Retrospective Mizoguchi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. Mizoguchi, Kenji, ‘‘Mes Films,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1959. ‘‘Mizoguchi Kenji,’’ in Cinéma d’aujord’hui (Paris), no. 31, 1965. Yoda, Yoshikata, ‘‘Souvenirs sur Mizoguchi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1967. Yoda, Yoshikata, ‘‘The Density of Mizoguchi’s Scripts,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), Spring 1971. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1975. Cohen, R., ‘‘Mizoguchi and Modernism,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Spring 1978. Masson, A., in Positif (Paris), November 1978. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Cinema: A Critical Diction- ary, edited by Richard Roud, London, 1980. Andrew, Dudley, and Tadao Sato, ‘‘On Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1980. Monty, Ib, in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), June 1983. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 481, April 1992. *** The Life of Oharu is surely Kenji Mizoguchi’s most important film. Artistically it ended a series of critical failures and indicates the half-dozen masterpieces that close his career. Financially it ultimately made enough money to land Mizoguchi a carte blanche contract with Daiei films, resulting in the artistic freedom he enjoyed at the end. Critically, Oharu marks the recognition of Mizoguchi by the West for the film captured top prize at the Venice Film Festival and made him a cult hero of Cahiers du Cinéma. Mizoguchi may have made more perfect films (Westerners prefer Ugetsu monogatari; the Japanese choose Crucified Lovers), but seldom has a film meant so much to a director and his future. Beyond these practical considerations, Oharu was, of all his films, the one he struggled the longest to get on the screen. The idea of adapting Saikaku’s 17th-century picaresque classic came to him at the beginning of the war, and he actively sought to produce it once the war had ended. But American restrictions against historical subjects and the evident expense this film would entail frightened all the studios he approached. When the Americans pulled out of Japan in 1950, Mizoguchi could count eight films made during the occupation, not one of which satisfied him or pleased the critics. He needed a big success more than ever. While shooting the last of these films, he was galled to learn that Akira Kurosawa had received the top prize at Venice for Rashomon. How could a young director with only a handful of films and little personal experience win such a prize? In a rare interview Mizoguchi claimed that he had cut down his drinking to extend his life so that he could make at least one great film. No artist, he felt, achieved anything truly great until after he was 50. Mizoguchi was 52 when he said this, and it was clear that from then on he would waste no more time. He wanted greatness. His ambition was matched by that of his longtime leading actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, whose trip to the United States had halted a skid in her artistic reputation. Mizoguchi had been appalled at the gaudy welcome she received at the airport on her return. He shamed her into working with him, and together they agreed to risk their careers on this film. Mizoguchi was able to subcontract the film from a newly estab- lished company through Shin Toho, assuring it some distribution, though he would have no studio at his disposal for its production. Filming took place in a bombed-out park midway between Kyoto and Osaka. Every 15 minutes a train between these cities passed nearby, the noise allowing for no more than one of Mizoguchi’s invariably long takes at a time; to Mizoguchi the idea of dubbing was unaccept- able. Planning went on for days, since he refused to begin until his crane arrived from Kyoto, and until his assistants returned from museums, where they were trying to secure authentic props to replace the copies which had already been prepared. The concentration on the set was legendary. When his chief assistant argued with him over a problem in which Mizoguchi was clearly being unreasonable, he fired the assistant. After an unexpected snowfall he had 30 men spend an exhausting 3 hours clearing it away, only to scrap the proposed site when he noticed a snowcapped peak in the background. The film took months to complete and cost 46 million yen. Japan had never seen a film to match its scope and rigor; it was perhaps too taxing a film for Japanese audiences. The intellectuals complained that Mizoguchi had lost Saikaku’s irony and humor in his realistic and sympathetic treatment of Oharu. The populace was no doubt frus- trated by its length, tempo, and inevitability. The film virtually sank Shintoho, but the critics continued to discuss it. While it placed only 9th on the annual list of Japan’s 10 best films, it was selected to represent the country at Venice, where it stunned the jury who awarded it the grand prize. What made the film so exceptional was the camera perspective which was omniscient yet sympathetic. As Oharu descends from a privileged life at court down the ladder to the untouchable, name- less, mendicant nun at the end, she achieves nobility and wisdom. Where Saikaku had parodied her erotic exploits and used her to satirize all levels of Tokugawa culture, Mizoguchi finds her odyssey painful and sacred. She is the purest of all his sacrificing women who suffer at the hands of a male world not worthy of them. This hagiographic tone is felt in the incredible camera flourishes that terminate so many sequences. The falling of the camera away from the beheading of Toshiro is the most hysterical fall; indeed, its point of rest is a perfect composition, including the sword still glistening from its bloody work. When the family flees in exile from the court, the camera coolly watches them cross the bridge, only to dip under the bridge at the last moment and catch a final glimpse of them passing a single tree far away. The graceful movement here serves to keep the subject in view, but more importantly, it is the melancholy reaction of an observer to a woeful tale. In the final shot Oharu, bowing to the temple, passes out of the frame, allowing the camera to hold on to that temple in a sacramental finale that comprehends a life gone so low it is now forever out of view. Long and solemn, The Life of Oharu is an immensely mature work of art. —Dudley Andrew SALAAM BOMBAY!FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1045 SALAAM BOMBAY! India-France-Great Britain, 1988 Director: Mira Nair Production: National Films Development Corporation (New Delhi)- Cadrage (Paris)-Channel 4 (London). A Mirabi Films production; in color; running time: 113 minutes; length: 10,271 feet. Released 1988. Filmed in Hindi, with English subtitles. Executive producers: Anil Tejani, Michael Nozik, Gabriel Auer; producer: Mira Nair; co-producer: Mitch Epstein; screenplay: Sooni Taraporevala; Hindi dialogue: Hriday Lani; photography: Sandi Sissel; editor: Barry Alexander Brown; supervising sound editor: Margie Crimmins; production designer: Mitch Epstein; art directors: Nitish Roy, Nitin Desai; costume designers: Deepa Kakkar, Nilita Vachani, Dinaz Stafford; music: L. Subramaniam; children’s workshop director: Barry John; film extract: Mr. India (1987). Cast: Shafiq Syed (Krishna, ‘‘Chaipau’’); Raghubir Yadav (Chillum); Aneeta Kanwar (Rekha); Nana Patekar (Baba); Hansa Vithal (Manju); Mohnaraj Babu (Salim); Chandrashekhar Naidu (Chungal); Chanda Sharma (Solasaal, ‘‘Sweet Sixteen’’); Shaukat Kaifi (Madame); Sarfuddin Quarrassi (Koyla); Raju Barnad (Keera); Dinshaw Daji (Parsi Bawaji); Alfred Anthony (Lalua Chor); Ramesh Deshavani (Murtaza); Anjan Srivastava (Superintendent); Irshad Hashmi (Chacha); Yunus Parvez (Hashimbhai); Ameer Bhai (Ravi, Rekha’s Rich Cousin); Sulbha Deshpande (Hemlata Joshi); Mohan Tanturu (Chillum II); Amrit Patel (Circus Boss); Murari Sharma (Ticket Seller); Ram Moorti (Mad Man); Kishan Thapa (Nepali Middleman); Haneef Zahoor (Bouncer); Ramesh Rai (Barber); Shaukut H. Inamdar (Crawford Market Shopkeeper); Irfan Khan (Scribe); Neil Gettinger (American Big Dog); Double Battery Stafford (Sexy Woman in Movie Theatre); Rana Singh (Sleazy Man in Movie Theatre); Ali Bhai (Butcher at Crawford Market); Jayant Joshi (Tailor); Prashant Jaiswal (Crooner at Wedding); Joyce Barneto (Bride); Hassan Kutty (Bridegroom). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 8 June 1988. Nair, Mira, in Première (Paris), August 1988. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1988. Dieckmann, Katherine, in Village Voice (New York), 11 Octo- ber 1988. Nair, Mira, in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1988. Malcolm, Derek, ‘‘Street Credibility,’’ in Guardian (London), 20 January 1989. Interview with Mira Nair, in City Limits (London), 26 January 1989. Parmar, Prathiba, ‘‘Mira Nair: Filmmaking in the Streets of Bom- bay,’’ in Spare Rib (London), February 1989. Pym, John, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1989. Moore, Suzanne, in New Statesman and Society (London), 3 Febru- ary 1989. Ehrlich, L. C., ‘‘The Name of the Child: Cinema as Social Critique,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1990. Arora, P., and K. Irving, ‘‘Culturally Specific Texts, Culturally Bound Audiences: Ethnography in the Place of its Reception,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Los Angeles), no. 1–2, 1991. Orenstein, Peggy, ‘‘Salaam America!: An Interview with Director Mira Nair,’’ in Mother Jones, vol. 17, no. 1, January-Febru- ary 1992. Simpson, Janice C., ‘‘Focusing on the Margins,’’ in Time, vol. 139, no. 9, 2 March 1992. Virdi, J., ‘‘(Mis)representing Child Labor,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), July 1992. Cinema in India, vol. 4, no. 1, 1993. ‘‘The ‘Tough’ Sister,’’ in UNESCO Courier, November 1998. *** It is difficult to distinguish Mira Nair’s film about Bombay’s street children, Salaam Bombay!, from its existence as a media event. In India, radio shows, newspaper advertising, and Salaam Bombay! t- shirts have been harnessed to ‘‘sell’’ the film in ways similar to the marketing of the usual western film industry product. This might account for the rather cool response of domestic reviewers; in addition, the expatriate status of the director and even certain inflec- tions of the narrative have been cited as indices of the film’s tainted, inauthentic ‘‘foreignness.’’ Nair’s objective is evidently to promote the film, and she is prepared to use whatever means are at hand. However, this unabashed approach to the promotion of what would ordinarily rank as a social problem film in the tradition of India’s state-supported ‘‘middle’’ cinema does present problems. To redress this uncertainty about the zone between strategy and message, it is important to acknowledge that Salaam Bombay! does exist at the level of a reforming social project. The seriousness of the filmmakers’ engagement with their subject has been fully indicated. Nair and her colleagues undertook detailed research into the lives of the street children. They set up a Salaam Bombay! trust for them and a school for their education. Concern for the children has extended beyond the film in the monitoring of each child’s development and the attempt to ensure that the children are given the opportunity of improving their situation. There is, however, a complex relationship between this activity— one predicated on knowledge, commitment, and thereby trust—and the re-ordering of the performative and existential attributes of the film’s subject. Nair has remarked that it was observing the facility of the street children performing for their living that set her thinking about the film. Workshops were used to channel the children’s skills into realist conventions of acting; their urge to perform in terms of the Hindi popular cinema’s excesses of gesture and ‘‘theatrically’’ articu- lated dialogue was discouraged. The film allows such ‘‘artificiality’’ only in strictly regulated contexts, notably those used to dramatize the humiliation of the individual by the group and the delineation of a kind of daydream make-believe. Otherwise there is an underplaying of performance in the representation of the individual, a stress on the imperative of ‘‘capturing’’ intimate psychological states rather than essaying broad melodramatic flourishes. This re-education of the children’s performative skills extended to the way in which even camera performance was registered; Nair has noted that lead child actor Shafiq Syed reprimanded another actor for disturbing spatial continuity between shots. SALAAM BOMBAY! FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1046 Salaam Bombay! How relevant is the question of ‘‘true’’ representation to the attributes of the street children? Which was the ‘‘normal’’ mode of relating to their world—the melodramatic one which they first presented, or the realist one into which they were educated? What is interesting is the way in which the film re-orders the children’s perception of the way they should relate to the world. Nair’s ability to bring this about is probably related to earlier documentary work in which she drew a responsive interaction from the people she was dealing with. She has used interview and cinéma vérité techniques (So Far from India, 1982, India Cabaret, 1985), but in ways which suggest a complicity of the subjects in the construction of their image. In Salaam Bombay! it is the induction of the cinéma vérité subject into an active fictionalization of his/her experience which leads not only to representation but, in a sense, reconstitution. None of this is intended to suggest that the film is ‘‘inauthentic’’; realist narration is certainly not an alien phenomenon in India, though it may be a minority one. Further, the rapport Nair and her crew struck up not only with individuals but with crowds is indicated by the vivid portrait the film presents of Bombay; in this context it may be placed alongside such documentary essays on the city as Bombay, Our City (Anand Patwardhan, 1985), about the struggle of street dwellers to protect their habitation. As for the film’s ‘‘foreignness,’’ one may speculate that it is precisely the multiplicity of cultural positions that the director occu- pies that enables her to regard her characters with a peculiar, resonating effect. On the one hand the film draws upon the need of the children to find some kind of stability and affection. On the other, it shows this drive as frustrated and leading to violence. The duality here re-enacts the recurrent, indeed obsessive concerns of the Hindi commercial cinema of the 1970s, though on very different representational terms. It also, interestingly, has another possible point of reference. The leading child character is obsessed with a teenage girl who is being inducted into prostitution by a pimp. The relationship between the girl and the man is ambiguous. The analogy with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is too striking to be missed. Perhaps the relationship lies within certain modern male obsessions and anxieties. Whatever the reason, it is likely that only an Indian living in New York could have drawn out these subterranean links between American modernism and Hindi ‘‘kitsch.’’ —Ravi Vasudevan LE SALAIRE DE LA PEURFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1047 LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR (The Wages of Fear) France-Italy, 1953 Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot Production: Filmsonor-C.I.C.C.-FonoRoma-Vera Film; black and white; running time: 140 minutes, some sources list 150 minutes; length: 12,600 feet, some sources list 13,000. Released 1953. Screenplay: Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the novel by Georges Arnaud; photography: Armand Thirard; editors: Madeleine Gug, Henri Rust; art director: René Renoux; music: Georges Auric. Cast: Yves Montand (Mario); Charles Vanel (Jo); Vera Clouzot (Linda); Folco Lulli (Luigi); Peter van Eyck (Bimba); William Tubbs (O’Brien); Centa (Chief of ‘‘Boss’’ Camp); Mario Moreno (Hernandez); Jo Dest (Smerloff). Awards: British Film Academy Award for Best Film from any Source, 1954. Publications Script: Clouzot, Henri-Georges, Le Salaire de la peur, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 17, 1962; as The Wages of Fear, in Masterworks of the French Cinema, London and New York, 1974. Books: Cournot, Michel, Le Premier Spectateur, Paris, 1957. Lacassin, Francis, and others, Le Procès Clouzot, Paris, 1964. Pilard, Philippe, H. G. Clouzot, Paris, 1969. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1970. Remond, Alain, Yves Montand, Paris, 1977. Rouchy, Marie-Elisabeth, Yves Montand, Paris, 1980. Monserrat, Jo?lle, Montand, Paris, 1983. Articles: Variety (New York), 29 April 1953. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1953. Bianco e Nero (Rome), June 1953. Cineaste (New York), nos. 7–8, 1954. Mauriac, Claude, in L’Amour du cinéma, Paris, 1954. Houston, Penelope, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1954. Sight and Sound (London), April-June 1954. Brulé, Claude, ‘‘Clouzot est-il vraiment diable,’’ in Ciné-Revue (Paris), 2 May 1955. Film Culture (New York), May-June 1955. Tennant, Sylvia, ‘‘Henri-Georges Clouzot,’’ in Film (London), March- April 1956. Bianchi, Pietro, ‘‘Henri-Georges Clouzot,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven, Connecticut), Summer 1956. Fontaine, A., ‘‘Clouzot sort de sa legende,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), July 1960. Schrader, Paul, ‘‘An Interview with Henri-Georges Clouzot,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), no. 4, 1969. Prédal, René, ‘‘Une Carrière exemplaire: Charles Vanel,’’ in Cinéma Aujourd’hui (Paris), no. 10, 1976. Lacourbe, R., ‘‘Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1907–1977,’’ in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 April 1977. Le Peron, S., ‘‘Charles Vanel par Charles Vanel,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 November 1981. Yakir, D., ‘‘Clouzot: The Wages of Film,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1981. Films and Filming (London), January 1986. Thomajan, Dale, ‘‘Clouzot’s Wild Bunch,’’ in Film Comment (New York), no. 376, January 1986. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Being and Nitroglycerin,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 36, 22 October 1991. Van Gelder, L., ‘‘At the Movies,’’ in New York Times, vol. 141, C10, 11 October 1991. Canby, V., ‘‘Review/Film: Clouzot’s Wages of Fear: Version Com- plete,’’ in New York Times, vol. 141, C8, 18 October, 1991. Pitman, Randy, in Library Journal, vol. 117, no. 7, 15 April 1992. Porton, Richard, ‘‘A Second Look,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 19, no. 1, 1992. The New York Times, 11 June 1992. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘Hell on Wheels,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1319, 29 November 1995. Howard, T., in Reid’s Film Index, no. 16, 1995. Elia, M., in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 189/190, March/June 1997. *** The international acclaim accorded the French New Wave has tended to shroud the pre-New Wave French cinema in desultory neglect. Henri-Georges Clouzot has particularly been underappreciated, his films decreasingly programmed. With The Wages of Fear this is particularly surprising, given the huge initial success of the film, both critically and commercially. A suspense thriller with clear philo- sophical overtones, The Wages of Fear deals with a group of international losers who end up down-and-out in a poor, underdevel- oped section of Venezuela, with few prospects for escaping the torpor and petty tensions of their lives. The texture of the film, with its multiplicity of spoken languages, is strikingly dense and in keeping with Clouzot’s theme of universal alienation. Although the set-up is quite slow by contemporary narrative standards, Clouzot’s visual design is masterful: the first hour is dominated by constant and oppressive imprisoning shadows cast over the main characters and by costumes overwhelmed with vertical or horizontal stripes. Indeed, when Yves Montand’s Mario says, ‘‘It’s like prison here,’’ the sentiment seems almost redundant, so pervasive is Clouzot’s visual expression of the entrapment by life itself. When, midway through the film the down-and-outs are given the opportunity to escape their lot by undertaking an incredibly danger- ous task, the fact that hundreds are willing to risk their lives is just more evidence that lives are worth little indeed. This opportunity is created by an oil-well fire, an ecological disaster, but, more to the point, a financial catastrophe for the American Oil Company. It must transport one ton of highly explosive nitroglycerine to the site in order LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1048 Le salaire de la peur to extinguish the fire. Ultimately, four disparate men are chosen to drive the two explosive-laden trucks across the dangerous terrain. The core of The Wages of Fear is this trip itself, which functions as metaphor for the existential horror that comprises Clouzot’s world view. Clouzot presents at least four striking images of existential nothingness, one for each of the natural elements. Perhaps the strongest, conceptually, is the explosion that literally blows up two of the men into thin air—leaving no trace of their having ever existed, save for a solitary cigarette holder, soon forgotten. The second metaphor is a liquid, black pit, into which one of the adventurers— Charles Vanel’s Jo, Clouzot’s archetypal man: non-heroic, petty, venal, and, above all, human—is sucked and crushed. It is not until Mario sees the third metaphor, however—the all-engulfing, destruc- tive fire itself, that his own search for escape climaxes in Jo’s death. The final image of nothingness has Mario, apparently saved from the nitroglycerine, nevertheless destroyed as he is smashed into the earth and rock of the destructive terrain, which imposes its monolithic destiny. Air, liquid, fire, earth: all are revealed as horrific and naturally violent, like men’s souls. What particularly impresses today about The Wages of Fear is its striking influence on a variety of other films and filmmakers. Its metaphorical opening shots, for instance—children being entertained by bugs in the earth—suggest the similar opening of The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah, a filmmaker with a similar brutal world view. As an exemplary thriller of the navigated space, dealing with psychological concepts that relate human beings to objects and to empty spaces and with philosophical notions concerning the human condition, The Wages of Fear provides a model for John Boorman’s Deliverance, Andrei Konchalovsky’s equally existential Runaway Train (written in part by Akira Kurosawa), and William Friedkin’s rather incongruously entitled remake Sorcerer. In its representation of Third-World poverty and local color, The Wages of Fear suggests the Peter Weir of The Year of Living Dangerously and The Mosquito Coast; and in its indictment of capitalist imperialism in the context of suspense, it suggests Costa-Gavras, if filtered through the surreal acceptance of Luis Bu?uel. As action adventure genre, it has inspired films like Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix; as a rather cynical male-bonding film, it has anticipated films as disparate as Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon, Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz, and Dino Risi’s The Easy Life. And finally, in one of its penultimate scenes, when Jo—rotting on the inside from a gangrenous leg and covered on the outside with black oil as he is driven by Mario along SALT OF THE EARTHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1049 a clearly metaphorical road of like in the dead of night—announces, after ‘‘What a long street it is’’ that ‘‘there is nothing. . . ,’’ and then dies, the imagery, dialogue, and psychological insights are surpris- ingly similar to the climactic scene of Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher, a thriller of the New Wave period which rather unfairly made Clouzot seem old-fashioned. —Charles Derry SALT OF THE EARTH USA, 1954 Director: Herbert J. Biberman Production: Independent Productions Corporation and the Interna- tional Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers; black and white, 35mm; running time 92 minutes. Released 1954, New York City. Filmed 1953 in the Bayard Region of New Mexico. Producers: Paul Jarrico with Sonja Dahl Biberman and Adolfo Barela; screenplay: Michael Wilson with Herbert J. Biberman; photography: Leonard Stark and Stanley Meredith, some sources list director of photography as Simon Lazarus; editors: Ed Spiegel and Joan Laird; sound: Dick Staunton and Harry Smith; production design: Sonja Dahl and Adolfo Bardela; music: Sol Kaplan. Cast: Professional actors—Rosaura Revueltas (Esperanza Quintero); Will Geer (Sheriff); David Wolfe (Barton); Melvin Williams (Hartwell); David Sarvis (Alexander); non-professional actors—Juan Chacón (Ramón Quintero); Henrietta Williams (Teresa Vidal); Ernest Velásquez (Charley Vidal); Angela Sánchez (Consuelo Ruíz); Joe T. Morales (Sal Ruíz); Clorinda Alderette (Luz Morales); Charles Cole- man (Antonio Morales); Virginia Jencks (Ruth Barnes); Clinton Jencks (Frank Barnes); E. A. Rockwell (Vance); William Rockwell (Kimbrough); Frank Talavera (Luís Quintero); Mary Lou Castillo (Estella Quintero); Floyd Bostick (Jenkins); Victor Torres (Sebastian Prieto); E. S. Conerly (Kalinsky); Elvira Molano (Mrs. Salazar); Adolfo Barela and Albert Mu?oz (Miners); and the men and women of Local 890, International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Work- ers, Bayard, New Mexico. Publications Script: Wilson, Michael, Salt of the Earth, compiled by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, New York, 1978. Books: Cogley, John, Report on Blacklisting I: Movies, New York, 1956. Biberman, Herbert, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film, Bos- ton, 1965. Lorence, James J., Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America, Albuquerque, 1999. Articles: ‘‘Hollywood Film Writers,’’ in Nation (New York), 15 January 1949. ‘‘Interview with Herbert Biberman,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Novem- ber 1950. ‘‘I.U.M.M.S.W. with Love,’’ in Time (New York), 23 February 1953. ‘‘Silver City Troubles,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 16 March 1953. Bloom, H., ‘‘Vigilantism Plays the Villain, Silver City, N. Mex.,’’ in Nation (New York), 9 May 1953. Biberman, Herbert, and Paul Jarrico, in Cinéma (Paris), March 1955. McFadden, Patrick, ‘‘Blacklisted,’’ in Take One (Montreal), no. 5, 1967. ‘‘Interview with Herbert Biberman,’’ in Positif (Paris), Summer 1969. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June 1971. McCormick, R., in Cineaste (New York), no. 4, 1973. Debacker, J., ‘‘Dossier: Le Sel de la terre,” in Apec—Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), no. 4, 1974–75. Fausing, B., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Autumn 1975. Borde, Raymond in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 5, 1976. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), July 1977. Hoen, P. R., in Filmavisa (Oslo), no. 4, 1978. Haudiquet, P., ‘‘Le Sel de la terre à la liste noire,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), June 1978. Turroni, G., in Filmcritica (Rome), May 1979. Heredero, C. F., in Cinema 2002 (Madrid), November 1979. Rosenfelt, D., ‘‘Ideology and Structure in Salt of the Earth,” in Jump Cut (Chicago), 30 December 1979. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies 2, New York, 1983. Miller, Tom, ‘‘Class Reunion: Salt of the Earth Revisited,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 13, no. 3, 1984. Crowdus, Gary, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 15, no. 1, 1986. Bosshard, A., ‘‘Which Side Are You On?’’ in Illusions (Wellington), no. 8, June 1988. Jarrico, P., ‘‘Letters: Salt of the Earth,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 17, no. 1, 1989. Riambau, Esteve, and C. Torreiro, ‘‘This Film is Going to Make History: An Interview with Rosaura Revueltas,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 19, no. 2–3, 1992. Jerslev, A., ‘‘Salt of the Earth Revisited,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenha- gen), vol. 42, no. 218, Winter 1996. Hoberman, J., ‘‘West Side Story,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 43, 13 January 1998. *** Salt of the Earth was produced as a self-consciously radical film during one of the most repressive periods in American political history. Started by a number of Hollywood’s blacklisted, it soon attained the status of a truly collective film enterprise, employing the talent and experience of many of those involved in the real events the film portrays as well as the original group of ousted Hollywood professionals. Because it was conceived as a politically radical statement on working conditions, union organizing, and relations between the races and sexes, Salt of the Earth faced official and unofficial harassment from political and industrial leaders whose thinking characterized the McCarthy era. Salt of the Earth began as a film project when blacklisted producer Paul Jarrico and his family visited a miners’ strike in Grant County, New Mexico. Previously, a number of blacklisted Hollywood profes- sionals, including some of the recently released Hollywood Ten, had SALT OF THE EARTH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1050 Salt of the Earth formed Independent Productions Corporation in 1951 with $10,000 from theater operator Simon Lazarus, and another $25,000 from an array of sympathetic businessmen. The group was unable to decide on a project until Jarrico returned with his suggestion to film a story based on the miners’ real experiences in the strike he had just witnessed. Screenwriter Michael Wilson then ventured to Grant County three months prior to the end of the almost one and a half year strike. Wilson made several trips between Los Angeles and Grant County, each time preparing a new script incorporating the input of the miners and their families. In its final form, the film tells a fictionalised story of New Mexico’s Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers strike against Empire Zinc, lasting from October 1950 to January 1952. The strike was characterized by an especially tense and violent atmosphere between Anglos and Chicanos. Ulti- mately, the miners’ wives took over the picket line to avoid a court injunction against the all male union workers, an event which profoundly affected the Chicano community’s attitudes about women’s rights. The emotional tensions generated by the strike—between Chicano and Anglo, and when the women walked the picket line, between husbands and wives—are portrayed in their impact on a fictional married couple, Ramon and Esperanza Quintero. Collective decision-making distinguished not only the script’s preparation but all aspects of the film’s production, marking an abrupt change in the hierarchical collaboration that characterized Hollywood filmmaking. Most of the roles were filled by the miners themselves and local Anglos, including the male lead Ramon, played by unionist Juan Chacon. The heroine was originally to be played by Gale Sondergaard, already involved in the project, but was finally cast with Rosaura Revueltas, a highly successful Mexican film star. Her participation in the film led to her deportation from the United States, and ultimately to the end of her film career. The production and post-production of Salt was hampered by constant harassment from industrial and political leaders. Hiring a union crew proved impossible as Roy Brewer, red-baiter and head of the I.A.T.S.F., refused to allow union personnel to participate. During the film’s shooting, the project and all those involved were denounced by union representatives in Hollywood, the trade press, and Congressman Donald Jackson in the House of Representatives, all leading to increasing tension in Grant County which hindered the film’s completion. Post-production was impeded not only by Hollywood union recalcitrance but also by Howard Hughes’s attempts to organize an SALVATORE GIULIANOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1051 industry-wide boycott of the film by post-production facilities through- out the country. The film’s exhibition encountered such strong resistance from I.A.T.S.E. projectionists, who under Brewer’s orders refused to project the finished film, that it was and still is seen most widely at union activities and outside the United States. The film is marred aesthetically by these outside pressures, since the tension and violence that marked the final shooting days and Revueltas’s deportation necessitated the inclusion of some poor sound footage and mismatched edits. Nevertheless, even today the film presents in its fictionalized account of the strike a powerful statement on workers’ conditions, union organizing, and changing relations between women and men and Chicanos and Anglos. —Michael Selig SALVATORE GIULIANO Italy, 1961 Director: Francesco Rosi Production: Lux Film and Vides-Galatea (Italy); black and white, 35mm; running time: 125 minutes, some sources list 135 minutes. Released 1961. Filmed in Sicily. Producer: Franco Cristaldi; screenplay: Francesco Rosi, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Enzo Provenzale, and Franco Solinas, based on official court records and journalistic reports on the career of Salvatore Giuliano; photography: Gianni Di Venanzo; editor: Mario Serandrei; sound: Claudio Maielli; art directors: Sergio Canevari and Carlo Egidi; music: Piero Piccioni; costume designer: Marilù Carteny. Cast: Frank Wolff (Gaspare Pisciotta); Salvo Randone (President of Viterbo Assize Court); Federico Zard (Pisciotta’s defense counsel); Pietro Camarata (Salvatore Giuliano); Fernando Cicero (Bandit); Sennuccio Benelli (Reporter); Bruno Ekmar (Spy); Max Cartier (Francesco); Giuseppe Calandra (Minor official); Cosimo Torino (Frank Mannino); Giuseppe Teti (Priest of Montelepre); Ugo Torrente. Awards: Berlin Film Festival, Best Direction, 1962. Publications Books: Rondi, Gian Luigi, The Italian Cinema Today 1952–1965, New York, 1966. Wlaschin, Ken, Italian Cinema Since the War, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Bolzoni, Francesco, I film di Francesco Rosi, Rome, 1986. Ciment, Michel, Le Dossier Rosi: Cinéma et politique, Paris, 1976; revised edition, 1987. Kezich, Tullio, Salvatore Giuliano, Acicatena, Italy, 1991. Testa, Carlo, editor, Poet of Civic Courage: The Films of Francesco Rosi, Westport, 1996. Articles: Films and Filming (London), December 1962. Bean, Robin, in Films and Filming (London), June 1963. Lane, John, in Films and Filming (London), August 1963. ‘‘Francesco Rosi: Interview,’’ in Film (London), Spring 1964. Thomas, John, in Film Society Review (New York), September 1966. Ravage, Maria-Teresa, in Film Society Review (New York), Octo- ber 1971. Crowdus, Gary, and D. Georgakas, ‘‘The Audience Should Not Be Just Passive Spectators,’’ in Cinearte (New York), no. 1, 1975. Netzeband, G., ‘‘Eisenstein, Rosi, Kieslowski und andere,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), no. 12, 1979. Baker, F. D., ‘‘Solo lo psicologo del film e non del personaggio: Colloquio con Francesco Rosi,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), Octo- ber 1979. ‘‘Rosi Issue’’ of Cinema (Zurich), vol. 28, no. 2, 1982. Elbert, L., in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), November 1983. Domecq, J.-P., in Positif (Paris), April 1984. Ciment, Michel, ‘‘Rosi in a New Key,’’ in American Film, vol. 9, September 1984. Rosi, Francesco, in Filmkultura (Budapest), January 1986. Dibilio, P., ‘‘Quand Rosi filmait Giuliano,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 424, 13 January 1988. ‘‘Spéciale première,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 435, Febru- ary 1988. Crowdus, G., ‘‘Francesco Rosi: Italy’s Postmodern Neorealist,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. Klawans, Stuart, and Howard Feinstein, ‘‘Illustrious Rosi,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, no. 1, January-February 1995. Restivo, Angelo, ‘‘The Economic Miracle and Its Discontents: Bandit Films in Spain and Italy,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 49, no. 2, Winter 1995–1996. ‘‘La Sicilia al presente storico: Salvatore Giuliano,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Milan), no. 31/32, 2nd edition, March 1998. *** Salvatore Giuliano, a Sicilian bandit who became a force in that island’s violent political affairs from the end of World War II until his violent death in 1950, is the subject of the third feature film by Francesco Rosi, former assistant director to Luchino Visconti. But in a real sense it is Sicily—the texture of its land and the interwoven social and political forces which shaped the career of this bandit—that is the true subject of the film. In many ways Salvatore Giuliano produces the effect of documen- tary. The scenario is based on extensive research into official court records as well as historical and journalistic reports surrounding the SALVATORE GIULIANO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1052 Salvatore Giuliano career of Giuliano. The confusion of these reports and records is preserved by the fractured structure of the film’s narrative. The non-fictional subject is the basis of a complex structure which relies more on selection of events and reconstruction than on inven- tion. The major structuring device is a voice-over narration, spoken by Rosi himself in the Italian version. This device, along with a few printed titles, accounts for much of the film’s documentary impact and serves to specify space and time in the major narrative sections. The structure alternates events following the bandit’s death in 1950 with flashbacks chronicling his career from the end of World War II. Within both the present and the flashback segments, the development is chronological but sharply elliptical. Within the flash- backs, events are selected around certain themes in Sicilian politics and Giuliano’s career—the Separatist movement, kidnapping, the attack on a leftist peasant gathering. The voice-over, with its verbal overload of information may contribute as much as the temporal structure to the film’s ambiguity. The various sources of power in Sicily—government, Separatists, police, army—are all eventually linked with the mafia, a connection more often implied by juxtaposition of image and voice-over than by direct statement. Salvatore Giuliano is concerned with Sicily not only in terms of its politics. The film was shot on location, using Sicilian non-profession- als as actors. Sweeping camera movements describe the uneven terrain that concealed and protected the bandits from their opponents. Rosi systematically withholds critical information. The bandit himself is on view as a corpse in the first sequence and then appears briefly several times in the flashbacks, his identity often obscured. And yet Rosi took pains to select an actor who resembled the real bandit. Giuliano’s murderer is the closest approximation to a devel- oped character, although he emerges from the background very late in the film. The lack of emphasis on characters is one clear distinction between this 1961 film and Italian neorealism. There is also, despite the location shooting and the careful research that contributed to the film, a new scepticism regarding the status of photographic reality. In the opening scene, a city official reads a fastidiously detailed descrip- tion of the death scene, its precision revealing absolutely nothing. In the course of the film, the viewer is shown that these apparent circumstances mask a complicated system of deception. —Ann Harris SAMMA NO AJIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1053 SAMMA NO AJI (An Autumn Afternoon) Japan, 1962 Director: Yasujiro Ozu Production: Shochiku Co.; Agfacolor, 35mm; running time: 113 minutes. Released November 1962, Japan. Producer: Shizuo Yamanouchi; screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda; photography: Yushun (or, Yuharu) Atsuta; editor: Yoshiyasu Manamura; sound: Yoshisaburo Senoo; art director: Tatsuo Hamada; music: Takanobu Saito. Cast: Chisu Ryu (Shuhei Hirayama); Shima Iwashita (Michiko Hirayama); Shin-ichiro Mikami (Kazuo Hirayama); Keiji Sada (Koichi Hirayama); Mariko Okada (Akiko Hirayama); Nobuo Nakamura (Shuzo Kawai); Kuniko Miyake (Nobuko Kawai); Ryuji Kita (Susumu Horie); Eijiro Tono (Sakuma); Teruo Yoshida (Miura). Publications Books: Richie, Donald, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Charac- ter, New York, 1971. Sato, Tadao, Ozu Yasujiro no Geijutsu (The Art of Yasujiro Ozu), Tokyo, 1971. Satomi, Jun, and others, Ozu Yasujiro—Hito to Shigoto (Yasujiro Ozu—The Man and His Work), Tokyo, 1972. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley, 1972. Richie, Donald, Ozu, Berkeley, 1974. Schrader, Leonard, and Haruji Nakumara, editors, Masters of Japa- nese Film, Tokyo, 1975. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Burch, No?l, To the Distant Observer, Berkeley, 1979. Tessier, Max, editor, Le Cinéma japonais au prèsent: 1959–1979, Paris, 1980. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Bordwell, David, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Princeton, 1988. Articles: Richie, Donald, ‘‘The Face of ‘63—Japan,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July 1963. Milne, Tom, ‘‘Flavour of Green Tea over Rice,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1963. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu: Syntax of His Films,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1963–64. ‘‘Ozu Issue’’ of Kinema Jumpo (Tokyo), February 1964. Ryu, Chisu, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1964. Iwasaki, Akira, ‘‘Ozu,’’ in Film (London), Summer 1965. Tung, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1965–66. Haruji, and Leonard Schrader, ‘‘Ozu Spectrum,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), no. 1, 1970. Farber, Manny, ‘‘Ozu,’’ in Artforum (New York), June 1970. Phillipe, Jean-Claude, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Dossiers du cinéma: Cinéastes, no. 1, Paris, 1971. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Ozu,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Sum- mer 1972. Zeman, Marvin, ‘‘The Zen Artistry of Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Film Journal (New York), Fall-Winter 1972. Tessier, Max, in Anthologie du Cinema 7, Paris, 1973. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell, ‘‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu,’’ in Screen (London), Summer 1976. Bezombes, R., in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1978. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), December 1978. Tessier, Max, in Ecran (Paris), December 1978. Delmas, J., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), December-January 1979. Colpart, G., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), series 23, 1979. Biette, J. C., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1979. Masson, A., in Positif (Paris), January 1979. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Ozu,’’ in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Richard Roud, London, 1980. Piccardi, A., ‘‘La tarda primavera di Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), July-August 1982. Geist, Kathe, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu: Notes on a Retrospective,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1983. Backer, F., and others, ‘‘Ozu: Meester in de beperking,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), Winter 1983–84. Berta, R., ‘‘A la recherche du regard,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1985. Tomczak, R., ‘‘Samma No Aji,’’ in Filmfaust, vol. 12, no. 64, February-March 1988. Ortiz, A., ‘‘El sabor de pescado de otono,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian, Spain), no. 25/26, December 1997. *** The title of Yasujiro Ozu’s last film, Samma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon), literally ‘‘taste of autumn swordfish,’’ symbolizes the ordinary in life, and represents another contemplative study of the serenity of Japanese middle-class family life. Ozu’s characteristic stylistic techniques are evident here. The film begins with a series of shots of chimneys from different angles, and proceeds to the corridor of an office building preparing our introduc- tion to a company executive, Mr. Hirayama—an editing pattern common in Ozu’s work. Another characteristic Ozu device is the use of a number of shots of restaurant and bar signs appearing for several seconds before the story inside the restaurant develops. We soon lose track of how often we witness the character enjoying a conversation over food and drink. All of these scenes are very deliberately SAMMA NO AJI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1054 Samma no aji composed, including the placement of food, dishes and beer bottles. The movements of the characters seem carefully choreographed throughout these scenes. We are shown in detail a high-school reunion, casual gossip between intimate friends, and discussions of household topics among couples and family members. The film’s central plot is the arrangement of the marriage of Hirayama’s daughter, Michiko, further developed by other marriage- related subplots. For example, Hirayama’s old high school teacher and his old maid daughter make Hirayama realize his duty to arrange Michiko’s marriage despite his own loneliness which will surely continue. We also see Michiko’s older brother’s trifling marriage problems; Michiko’s unsuccessful love for her brother’s friend; Hirayama’s friend’s happy remarriage to a younger wife; Hirayama’s secretary’s marriage; and Hirayama’s encounter with a barmaid who reminds him of his deceased wife. Subplots such as these are developed in lengthy, carefully edited conversation scenes. Ozu frequently uses frontal, close-up shot- reverse shots of characters’ faces (occasionally including unmatching eyelines). Indeed, the film’s narrative is developed more in these conversations and less by direct actions. Each dialogue is extremely concise, often omitting subjects and objects in the sentences, making it impossible to translate directly in the English subtitles. Ozu is obsessed with showing the empty space after any action takes place. After Michiko leaves her house on the wedding day, a series of shots showing her empty room during the day and at night are used to accentuate the emptiness after her departure. Particularly, the close-up shots of the big mirror and the vacated stool force us to realize that she, sitting there in her wedding gown just moments before, is now gone. The pathos is suggested by the systematic arrangement of shots of inanimate objects. Through the depiction of the non-dramatic atmosphere of peaceful human relationships between good-willed people, the film conveys the feeling of the quiet realization of the loneliness in life. It is deftly symbolized by the sequences at the bar where Hirayama drinks, listening nostalgically to the Japanese Navy march and then, at home, drinks water silently in the kitchen at the end of the corridor. The audience and critics appreciated the distinctive loneliness of Ozu’s world all the more for the light and even humorous nature of many of An Autumn Afternoon’s individual scenes. —Kyoko Hirano LE SAMOURAIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1055 SAMO JEDNOM SE LJUBI (You Only Love Once/Melody Haunts My Memory) Yugoslavia, 1981 Director: Rajko Grlic Production: Jadran Film; Eastmancolour, 35mm; running time: 104 minutes. Screenplay: Rajko Grlic, Branko Somen, and Srdan Karanovic; photography: Tomislav Pinter; editor: Zivka Toplak; art director: Stanislav Dobrina; music: Branislav Zivkovic. Cast: Predrag Manojlovic (Tomislav); Vladica Milosovljenic (Beba); Mladen Budiscak (Vule); Zijah Sokolovic (Mirko); Erland Josephson (Father). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 27 May 1981. Kolsek, P., Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 6–7, 1981. Dolmark, J.-M. Z., Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 8–9, 1981. White, Armond, and Marcia Pally, ‘‘The 16th New Directors: New Films Series,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 23, no. 3, May- June 1987. *** Samo Jednom Se Ljubi, or You Only Love Once, refers to a popular song of the early 1950s. But the viewer shouldn’t be fooled by the romantic implications of the title. Once more, as in Grlic’s earlier Bravo Maestro (1978), the theme of the film is political. Although the figures are all fictional, the screenplay itself was inspired by a young ballerina’s diary which was expanded to fit the atmosphere of the times. Grlic has described the scope of the film’s narrative as follows: My film, You Only Love Once, is based upon an authentic event that happened a few years after the war. Turning the pages of private memoirs and official documents of that time, I was struck by the harness of behaviour and relations, by that ‘‘social realism’’ which seems to get reincarnated—although with a step back- ward and without sentiments—and form a sort of an ‘‘image’’ of today’s kids. It is also important to recognize the collaboration on the script between Grlic and Srdjan Karanovic, Grlic’s classmate at the Prague Film School and a Belgrade director. They have, throughout the years, reciprocated on each other’s screenplays repeatedly. This collaboration was essential to the process of creating the film, which Grlic described as such: ‘‘In researching my project, I had the feeling of discovery of origins of certain current states of mind, which seem born in that transition period from war to peace.’’ The film tells the story of a small village in Croatia shortly after the war where there is a feeling of hope and promise between three ex- partisans who are now companions: the mayor, the chief of police, and the cultural head of the town (who is also a member of the secret police). But when an entertainment group arrives in town, Tomislav, the cultural wing of the trio, falls in love with Beba, a dancer from a bourgeois background who is attracted by Tomislav’s crude, bluffing manners. Violating the spirit of this trust, Tomislav per- suades Beba to marry him—whereupon his new wife’s aristocratic family moves in seeking to better their lot in a new society, or at least find a way to emigrate out of their old one. The couple’s love survives even when the times change and Tomislav is imprisoned. Tomislav eventually tracks her down in a sleazy nightclub in what is perhaps one of the strongest endings of all Yugoslav films. The films succeeds in working on two levels. First, as an examina- tion of postwar Yugoslavia trying to find its identity. Secondly, as a study of the destructiveness of human relationships, and the strength of love. —Mike Downey LE SAMOURAI France, 1967 Director: Jean-Pierre Melville Production: Filmel, C.I.C.C., Fida Cinematografica; colour, 35mm; running time: 105 minutes. Filmed in Paris, 1966. Producer: Raymond Borderie, Eugène Lepicier; screenplay: Jean- Pierre Melville, from the novel The Ronin by Joan McLeod; photog- raphy: Henri Decae; editors: Monique Bonnot, Yolande Maurette; assistant director: Georges Pellegrin; art director: Francois de Lamothe; music: Francois de Roubaix; sound editors: Alex Pront, Robert Pouret; sound recordist: René Longuet. Cast: Alain Delon (Jeff Costello); Francois Perier (The Inspector); Nathalie Delon (Jane Lagrange); Cathy Rosier (Valérie); Jacques Leroy (The Gunman); Jean-Pierre Posier (Olivier Rey); Catherine Jourdan (Hat-check girl); Michel Boisrond (Wiener); Robert Favart (Barman); André Salgues (Garage Man). Publications Books: Nogueira, Rui, Melville on Melville, London, 1971. McArthur, Colin, Underworld U.S.A, London, 1972. Nogueira, Rui, Le Cinéma selon Melville, Paris, 1973. Zimmer, Jacques, and Chantal de Béchaude, Jean-Pierre Melville, Paris, 1983. Armes, Roy, French Cinema, London, 1985. Bantcheva, Denitza, Jean-Pierre Melville: de l’oeuvre à l’homme, Troyes, 1996. LE SAMOURAI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1056 Le Samourai Articles: Variety (New York), 8 November 1967. Image et Son (Paris), December 1967. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1967. Truffaut, Fran?ois, and Rui Nogueira, ‘‘A Samurai in Paris,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1968. Focus on Film (London), September-October 1970. Milne, Tom, Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1971. Gow, G., Films and Filming (London), July 1971. Milne, Tom, ‘‘Le Samourai,’’ in Focus on Film, No. 7, 1971. Filmfacts (London), no.16, 1972. Koebner, Thomas, ‘‘Aus dem Leben der Automaten,’’ in Film-Dienst (Cologne), vol. 46, no. 11, 25 May 1993. Reader, Keith, Sight and Sound (London), September 1993. Rouyer, Philippe, ‘‘Le petit théatre de Jean-Pierre Melville,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 418, December 1995. Hogue, Peter, ‘‘Melville,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 6, November-December 1996. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Portrait of a Hit Man,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 42, 4 March 1997. Canby, Vincent, in The New York Times, 26 December 1997. Peachment, Chris, ‘‘A Man Apart,’’ in New Statesman, vol. 127, no. 4405, 2 October 1998. *** Jean-Pierre Melville had made his first, highly distinctive contri- bution to the ‘‘policier’’ in 1956 with Bob le flambeur, returning to it in 1963 with Le Doulos which, with Le Deuxième souffle (1963) and Le Samourai (1967), comprises a loose trilogy that represents one of the very summits of the genre. The French crime film is less well-known than the American variety (with the possible exception of Du Rififi chez les hommes), but its relative neglect is unjust, and Melville is one of its finest expo- nents. As Roy Armes has noted, he has adapted the mythology and iconography of the gangster film to his own distinct ends: ‘‘His criminals are idealised figures, their appearance stylised (with rain- coat, hat and gun predominant) and their behaviour oddly blending violence with ritualised politeness. The director has no interest in the realistic portrayal of life as it is and disregards both psychological depth and accuracy of location and costume. He uses his stars to LE SANG DES BêTESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1057 portray timeless, tragic figures caught up in ambiguous conflicts and patterns of deceit, relying on the actor’s personality and certainty of gesture to fill the intentional void.’’ Le Samourai opens with a quote (though largely made up by Melville) from the ‘‘Book of Bushido’’ to the effect that ‘‘there is no greater solitude than that of the Samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the jungle.’’ Solitude is a particularly Melvillian theme, explored in different ways in Bob le flambeur, Le Silence de la Mer, Leon Morin, pretre, Les Enfants terribles and L’Ainé des Ferchaux. Indeed, in his own life Melville was a fiercely independent filmmaker. In Le Samourai this theme of solitude is embodied in the hired killer Jeff Costello, depicted while on a series of increasingly mysterious and dangerous contracts, with the police gradually closing in on him and a beautiful nightclub pianist, Valérie, mesmerising him. From the opening shot, with Jeff lying stretched out and silent on his bed in a darkened room (as if ‘‘laid out’’ in death, as Melville himself put it), it is as if we are witnesses to a long, drawn-out, ritualistic process of harakiri. The mood of doom and fatefulness is as tangible as in a Fritz Lang film, and Melville heightens the feeling of strangeness and unease by zooming in and simultaneously tracking back—not an unusual technique by this time, but Melville consider- ably refines it by stopping the track occasionally as he continues the zoom, producing the effect that ‘‘everything moves, but at the same time everything stays where it is.’’ From here, the film progresses both as a classic American gangster film a la francaise and a wonderful exercise in mythology that quite specifically recalls Orphée (Melville had directed the film of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants terribles at Cocteau’s own request). On the gangster level, as Tom Milne has evocatively described the film, Le Samourai is ‘‘redolent of night, of gleaming city streets, of fast cars and guns weighed down by silencers as the lone wolf killer lopes steadily and disdainfully through a battery of police line-ups and interrogations, of encounters with syndicate hoods on lonely railway bridges and in the silence of his own room, never moving an inch from his chosen trail.’’ Quite outstanding in this respect is the elaborate pursuit of Jeff by the police through the Paris metro (according to Melville, one of the officers on the Paris crime squad remarked enviously to him: ‘‘If we were given the resources to set up tailing jobs like that, our task would be a lot easier’’). Almost equally striking, however, are the scenes in which Melville simply observes the mechanics of Jeff going about his business, such as the complex setting-up of an alibi that occupies the first two, virtually dialogue- less, reels of the film. As Milne notes, scenes such as these hinge entirely on ‘‘Melville’s meticulous observation of the precise, self- absorbed gestures and movements of a man alone and sufficient unto himself, whether he is hunter or hunted.’’ As a myth, on the other hand, Le Samourai is a variation on the theme of Orpheus being called to the underworld. If, in Orphée, it was the otherworldly Princess who becomes susceptible to human feel- ings and returns Orpheus’s love, here it is the icy, solitary Jeff whose feelings are awakened and who, thus shorn of his strength, deliber- ately accepts death and destiny. And just to underline the parallel with Orphée, the Princess is a white woman dressed in black, while Valérie is a black woman dressed in white. Le Samourai presents us with an utterly compelling, totally self- contained universe. Accordingly, nothing, but nothing, has been left to chance in the mise-en-scène. This is a film of almost Bressonian rigour and austerity, as elliptical as Jeff is abstract. So muted and atonal are the colours that at first one has the impression of watching a black-and-white film, or a bleached-out print. But gradually one realises that what we are witnessing is, as Milne has it, ‘‘a visual equivalent to Jeff’s steely, passionless mind. In him and around him, cold and toneless, Paris becomes a city of shadows, as silent and mysterious as Cocteau’s ‘zone de la mort:’ a place, in fact, where one is not in the least surprised to find Death herself waiting, beckoning the lonely samurai into her arms with her alluring promise of peace and companionship.’’ A word of warning, however. The dubbed version of this film is hideously duped and is also missing nine minutes of footage. To appreciate the true beauties of Le Samourai it is absolutely vital to see the original, or subtitled, version. —Julian Petley LE SANG DES BêTES (Blood of the Beasts) France, 1949 Director: Georges Franju Production: Forces et Voix de France; black and white, 35mm; running time about 20 minutes; length: 600 meters. Released 1949. Filmed 1949 in a slaughterhouse outside Paris. Producer: Paul Legros; screenplay: Georges Franju; commentary: Jean Painlevé; assistant directors: André Joseph and Julien Bonardier; photography: Marcel Fradetal assisted by Henri Champion; edi- tor: Andre Joseph; sound engineer: Raymond Vachere; music: Joseph Kosma. Cast: Nicole Ladmiral and Georges Hubert (spoken parts). Publications Script: Franju, Georges, and Jean Painlevé, Le Sang des bêtes, in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1964. Books: Lovell, Alan, Anarchist Cinema, London, 1962. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Personal Style, New York, 1966. Durgnat, Raymond, Franju, Berkeley, 1968. Vialle, Gabriel, Georges Franju, Paris, 1968. Articles: Goretta, Claude, ‘‘Aspects of French Documentaries,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1956–57. Grenier, Cynthia, ‘‘Franju,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1957. Godard, Jean-Luc, ‘‘Georges Franju,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1958. LE SANG DES BêTES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1058 Le sang des bêtes LE SANG D’UN POETEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1059 ‘‘Franju Issue’’ of Image et Son (Paris), March 1966. MacLochlainn, A., ‘‘The Films of Luis Bu?uel and Georges Franju,’’ in Film Journal (New York), Summer 1971. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Franju,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1971. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Terrible Buildings: The World of Georges Franju,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1973. ‘‘Le Sang des bêtes de Franju,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1976. Barbaro, Nick, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 27 April 1978. Boost, C., in Skoop (Amsterdam), August 1981. *** The unique tone of Georges Franju’s best work—which includes Le sang des bêtes—arises from its combination of hypersensitivity to pain (inseparable from an obsession with it) with an extraordinary poise. The peculiar distinction of his work goes inextricably with its very limited range: he is one of the cinema’s authentic minor poets. Although H?tel des Invalides (Franju’s masterpiece) is more complex, and although one would not wish to be without the other documentaries and many characteristic, privileged moments in the features, Le sang des bêtes already contains, in a form at once concentrated and comprehensive, all the major components of the Franju oeuvre. It is a film totally at odds with the Grierson school of documentary filmmaking (i.e., the task of documentary is to explain the world to us so that we can all understand each other): ‘‘under- standing,’’ to Franju, is the realization that civilization is constructed upon pain and horror and cannot be extricated from them. The opening of the film—typically casual and disarming—estab- lishes the location of the slaughterhouse. It is carefully set apart from the city that depends upon its activities, so that those who devour its products may be spared awareness of its existence, and of the physical realities of its interior. Separating it from Paris is a no-man’s land where a young worker kisses his girlfriend goodbye, and where the debris of civilization—a heterogeneous, quasi-Surrealist assortment of junk objects divorced from their domestic contexts and deposited on the wasteland grass—is offered for sale, secondhand. The se- quence (before we are introduced to any of the film’s horrors) establishes with gentle irony and tenderness, a sense of the absurd and the arbitrary, of a world that never confronts the oddity of what it terms ‘‘reality.’’ The slaughterhouse itself is the first in the long succession of ‘‘terrible buildings’’ that provide Franju’s work with one of its dominant recurrent motifs. It is a building at once thoroughly familiar, as everyone knows that slaughterhouses exist, but also hidden away because no one wants to confront or know about them. We are briefly shown the tools of slaughter. Then a white horse is led in through the gate. No one who has seen the film ever forgets the moment when a so-called humane killer is casually applied to its head and fired. From that moment on, the film spares us nothing of the details of slaughter, disembowellment, dismemberment. What is remarkable about the film is the way in which it scrupulously avoids, on the one hand, sadistic relish, and, on the other, the note of protest. Everything is shown calmly, dispassionately, generally at a distance. If a close-up is used, it is to clarify a detail of method or procedure. If the film converts some spectators to vegetarianism, this is purely incidental, a by-product of the audience’s exposure to material they would prefer not to know about. The film is at once far more ambitious and far less presumptuous: it wishes to make us confront, with neither hysteria nor coercion, an aspect of the material reality on which our civiliza- tion is based. —Robin Wood LE SANG D’UN POETE (The Blood of a Poet) France, 1930 Director: Jean Cocteau Production: Black and white, 35mm; running time: 58 minutes. Released 1930. Producer: Vicomte de Noailles; screenplay: Jean Cocteau; photog- raphy: Georges Périnal; sound: Henri Labrély; production design: Jean Gabriel d’Aubonne; music: Georges Auric. Cast: Lee Miller (The Statue); Enrico Rivero (The Poet); Jean Desbordes (The Louis XV Friend); Féral Benga (The Black Angel); Pauline Carton; Odette Thalazac; Fernand Duchamps; Lucien Jager; Barbette; Jean Cocteau (Narrator). Publications Script: Cocteau, Jean, Le sang d’un poète, Paris, 1948; as The Blood of a Poet, New York, 1949; also included in ‘‘Le sang d’un poète Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1–15 May 1983. Books: Crosland, Margaret, Jean Cocteau, London, 1955. Dauven, Jean, Jean Cocteau chez les sirènes, Paris, 1956. Kihm, Jean-Jacques, Cocteau, Paris, 1960. Pillaudin, Roger, Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film, Paris, 1960. Fraigneau, Andre, Cocteau, New York, 1961. Fowlie, Wallace, Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet’s Age, Bloom- ington, Indiana, 1968. Lannes, Roger, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1968. Sprigge, Elizabeth, and Jean-Jacques Kihm, Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror, New York, 1968. Gilson, Rene, Cocteau, New York, 1969. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1970. Phelps, R., editor, Professional Secrets: an Autobiography of Jean Cocteau Drawn from His Lifetime Writings, New York, 1970. Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau, Boston, 1970. Cocteau on the Film, New York, 1972. Evans, Arthur, Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity, Philadelphia, 1977. Thiher, Allen, The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, Columbia and London, 1979. LE SANG D’UN POETE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1060 Le sang d’un poete Anderson, Alexandra and Carol Saltus, editors, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, New York, 1984. de Miomandre, Philippe, Moi, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1985. Keller, Marjorie, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1986. Peters, Arthur King, Jean Cocteau and His World: An Illustrated Biography, London, 1987. Articles: New Statesman and Nation (London), 8 April 1933. New York Times, 3 November 1933. Variety (New York), 7 November 1933. Wallis, C. G., in Kenyon Review (Gambier, Ohio), Winter 1944. Yale French Studies (New Haven, Connecticut), Summer 1956. Oxendandler, Neal, ‘‘On Cocteau,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1964. Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Gauteur, C., ‘‘Jean Cocteau et le Cinéma Issue’’ of Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1972. Campigli, M., in Bianco e Nero (Rome), March-April 1973. Renaud, T., ‘‘Retrospective. Jean Cocteau. Un Cinéaste? Peut-être. Un Auteur? Certainement,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), December 1973. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1977. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘The Mirrors of Life,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), February 1978. Milani, R., ‘‘Cocteau dell’immaginario,’’ in Filmcritica (Florence), June 1984. Paech, J., ‘‘Orpheus hinter den Spiegeln,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), July 1989. Lalanne, Jean-Marc, ‘‘Profession: Phenixologe,’’ Mensuel du Cin- ema (Paris), no. 10, October 1993. *** Though the 1920s are generally considered the most significant years of experiment with filmic forms in French cinema, two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the avant-garde, Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète and Luis Bu?uel’s L’age d’or, both date from the beginning of the sound era in the early 1930s. The bitter opposition, feuds and mutual denunciations existing at this time between Cocteau SANS SOLEILFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1061 and the Surrealists seem in retrospect of less importance than the common avant-garde impulse which unites them. Significantly, both Le sang d’un poète and Bu?uel’s film were funded in exactly the same way, through private commissions by the wealthy art lover and socialite, the Vicomte de Noailles. Despite their differences and incompatibilities both films have proved to be lasting works of cinematic imagination. They provide a common inspiration for later independent filmmakers throughout the world. Jean Cocteau came to the cinema as an amateur who had already acquired a literary reputation, though he was never concerned with the application of literary ideas or practices to film. Instead he saw filmmaking as a manual craft and gave far greater weight to the qualities of the film image than to the demands of a conventional narrative development. As Le sang d’un poète shows so clearly, he was a filmmaker able to disregard the conventionalities of cinematic construction simply because he never learned them in the first place. His essentially amateur approach is reflected in his choice of non- professional players for most of the key roles of the film. This did not preclude him from calling upon highly talented collaborators with real professional skills—such as George Périnal or Georges Auric— to assist him with the photography and music for Le sang d’un poète. Cocteau has often denied that Le sang d’un poète contains either symbols or allegorical meaning. It uses some of the mechanics of the dream, not to explore social or psychological realities, but as ends in themselves. His concern is less to analyze than simply to recreate a state of inner consciousness, a world preceding rational thought. To this end he applies a whole range of trick devices—animation, mirrors, reverse action, false perspectives—and deliberately blurs the boundaries between the live action and graphic work or sculpture. Though haunted, like so much of Cocteau’s work, by the omnipres- ence of death, Le sang d’un poète is a lyrical, idyllic work without tension or conflict. In Cocteau’s mythology, death is reversible, just one aspect of a constant play of transformation. It is the director’s ability to present this in a totally personal manner—aided by the first- person narration spoken by Cocteau himself—which makes the film such a fascinating work. Le sang d’un poète introduces a distinctive new voice to world cinema. It contains an initial statement of virtually all the guiding themes of Cocteau’s film work, and since it was followed by a dozen or more years of silence, it has a hauntingly premonitory quality. The wealth of themes and obsessions it contains is brought out clearly by the rich series of films from La belle et la bête to Le testament d’Orphée, which Cocteau made when he returned to film directing after World War II. Both as a work in its own right and as a forerunner of the director’s later feature work, Le sang d’un poète has lost nothing of its power to fascinate and intrigue. —Roy Armes SANS SOLEIL (Sunless) France, 1982 Director: Chris Marker Production: Argos Films; colour; running time: 100 minutes. Producer: Anatole Dauman; screenplay: Chris Marker; photogra- phy: Chris Marker, Sana na N’hada, Jean-Michel Humeau, Mario Marret, Eugenio Bentivoglio, Danièle Tessier, Haroun Tazieff; edi- tor: Chris Marker; assistant director: Pierre Camus; music (elec- tronic sounds): Michel Krasna. Publications Articles: Gauthier, G., Revue du Cinéma (Paris), February 1983. Jeancolas, J.P., ‘‘Le monde à la lettre,’’ in Positif (Paris), Febru- ary 1983. Amiel, M., Cinéma (Paris), March 1983. Lardeau, Y., ‘‘L’empire des mots,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1983. Marker, Chris, ‘‘Reécrire la mémoire,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), March 1983. Variety (New York), 13 April 1983. Martineau, R., Séquences (Paris), April 1984. Jenkins, Steve, ‘‘Sans Soleil (Sunless),” in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1984. Rafferty, Terrence, ‘‘Marker Changes Trains,’’ in Sight and Sound, Autumn 1984. Biro, Yvette, ‘‘In the Spiral of Time,’’ in Millennium Film Journal, Autumn-Winter 1984–85. Eisen, K., Cineaste (New York), 1985. Casebier, A., ‘‘A Deconstructive Documentary,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (New York), Winter 1988. Rouch, J., and others, ‘‘Culture and Representation,’’ in Undercut, no. 17, Spring 1988. Michael Walsh, ‘‘Around the World, Across All Frontiers: Sans Soleil as Depays,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), Autumn 1989. Wilmott, G., ‘‘Implications for a Sartrean Radical Medium: From Theatre to Cinema,’’ in Discourse (Detroit), no. 12.2, Spring- Summer 1990. Bluemlinger, C., ‘‘Futur anterieur,’’ in Iris, no. 19, Autumn 1995. Kohn, Olivier, ‘‘Chris Marker,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 433, March 1997. Kohn, O., ‘‘Si loin, si proche,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 433, March 1997. Jousse, Thierry, ‘‘Trois vidéos et un CD-ROM autour de Chris Marker,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 515, July-August 1997. *** Almost impossible to synopsise, Sans Soleil has been described by Michael Walsh as ‘‘surely among the most physically beautiful, the most inventively edited, and the most texturally sophisticated of recent European films.’’ Yvette Biro described the film as ‘‘a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk which defies the conventional pose between the ‘raw and the cooked,’ that is: document and fiction, but also between word and image; unclassifiable as all his former films, Sans Soleil appears as a summary of Marker’s long travellings.’’ Put at its simplest, the film takes the form of a series of letters, from an imaginary cameraman (‘‘Sandor Krasna’’) to an equally SANS SOLEIL FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1062 Sans Soleil imaginary woman, which comment on the global array of images presented. At their most immediate level, the images present them- selves as a meditation on present day Japan, and also on the phenome- non of globalization. Marker had already confronted the global subject in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), an assemblage of stills taken all over the world between 1955 and 1965 for which he invented a commentary for three separate voices. His fascination with Japan had first revealed itself in Le mystère Koumiko (1965), in which Marker meditates on his subject after he has returned to Paris, has something of the allusive richness of Sans Soleil. Underlying the subjects of Japan and globalization, however, are concerns with rather less tangible matters such as time and memory. And underpinning the whole complex edifice is a fascinating and highly suggestive enquiry into images—what they mean, what might link them, and also what separates them. Sans Soleil is an absolute tour-de-force of editing, but it is much more than just a flashy exercise. Marker is the inheritor of the great montage tradition established by Vertov, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Medvedkin—and he made two films about this last cinematic pioneer: Le Train en marche (1971) and Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1993). Like these filmmakers (and his contemporary, Godard), Marker is an indefatigable anti-realist: what concerns him above all are images as images, how their meanings change across time, across space, and according to the other images with which they’re placed. As Marker’s Japanese friend says of the images we see him synthesising in Sans Soleil, they ‘‘at least proclaim themselves for what they are— images—not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessi- ble reality.’’ Marker is fascinated by the world of appearances (‘‘I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photo- graph, don’t tape’’), and in this vision of things nothing is insignifi- cant or worthless, indeed quite the opposite; as ‘‘Krasna’’ says: ‘‘I’ve been around the world a dozen times and now only banality interests me. On this trip I’ve pursued it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.’’ Not surprisingly, the commentary contains a reference to Levi-Strauss’ well-known remark about the ‘‘poignancy of things.’’ As Michael Walsh has noted, the elaborate montage patterns in Sans Soleil ‘‘proceed now by theme, now by association, now by disposition in the frame, now by camera angle, now by screen direction. Such matches leap audaciously across cuts from Japan to Iceland to Holland, from original to borrowed to found footage, from film to television to video.’’ Perhaps the most impressive sequence in a film full of impressive sequences is the one in which ‘‘Krasna’’ imagines ‘‘a single film made of the dreams of people on trains,’’ and sleeping passengers on the Tokyo underground are provided with a kaleidoscope of images from the previous night’s television as their ‘‘dreams.’’ Another theme that provides for a whole series of mon- tage-based variations (Sans Soleil, with its title borrowed from Mussorgsky’s song cycle of the same name, is nothing if not musical, and more specifically, fugal, in form) is that of commemoration. This SANSHO DAYUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1063 unites footage both of historical events and images of the ‘‘mediating animals’’ (and especially of the ‘‘maniki neko’’ cat) that Marker finds all over Tokyo. As Terrence Rafferty has observed: ‘‘Japan seems one huge festival of commemoration, a precise reflection of the mood of the traveller who’s left so many places, people, political move- ments behind, but kept bits of them on film, notes which have lost their immediacy, things which have stopped moving but inspire in him the desire to reanimate them at the editing table the only way available to him to commemorate the things that have quickened his heart.’’ The concern with memory is also at the heart of Sans Soleil’s fascination with Vertigo (the only film ‘‘capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory’’). Utilising a combination of stills and refilmed locations, the film itself seems to enter the famous spirals of Saul Bass’s title sequence, giving us an impression of ‘‘time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless—the eye.’’ As Steve Jenkins has sug- gested, Sans Soleil is, in the end, a film about time travel and, like Marker’s earlier La Jetée (1964), has elements of science fiction about it. However, Jenkins concludes: ‘‘Marker avoids the romantic pessimism which so often inflects both speculative fantasy and self- reflexivity. He attacks our present understanding of images, while at the same time exploring optimistic possibilities for the future. Whilst most filmmakers are crawling towards 2001, barely emerging from the nineteenth century, Marker is running on ahead.’’ —Julian Petley SANSHO DAYU (Sansho the Bailiff) Japan, 1954 Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Production: Daiei (Kyoto); black and white, 35mm; running time: 119 minutes, some sources list 123 minutes; length: 11,070 feet. Released 1954. Producer: Masaichi Nakata; screenplay: Yahiro Fuji and Yoshikata Yoda, from the novel by Ogai Mori; photography: Kazuo Miyagawa; editor: Mitsuji Miyata; sound engineer: Iwao Otani; production designers: Kisaku Ito with Uichiro Yamanoto and Nakajima Kozaburo; music: Tamekichi Mochizuki, Fumio Hayasaka, and Kanahichi Odera; traditional music: Shinichi; costume designer: Yoshio Ueno; consultant on ancient architecture: Giichi Fujiwara. Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka (Tamaki/Nakagimi); Yoshiaki Hanayagi (Zushio, his son); Kyoko Kagawa (Anju, his daughter); Eitaro Shindo (Sansho); Ichiro Sugai (Nio, Minister of Justice); Bontaro Miyake (Kichiji); Yoko Kosono (Kohagi); Chieko Naniwa (Ubatake); Kikue Mori (Miko); Ken Mitsuda (Morosane Fujiwara); Masao Shimizu (Masaji Taira, the father); Ryosuke Kagawa (Ritsushi Ummo); Akitake Kono Sansho Dayu (Tara, Sansho’s son); Kanji Koshiba (Kudo); Shinobu Araki (Sadayu); Masahiko Kato (Zushio, a boy); Keiko Enami (Anju, young girl); Naoki Fujima (Zushio, as small boy); Teruko Taigi (The other Nakagimi); Reiko Kongo (Shiono). Awards: Venice Film Festival, Silver Prize, 1954. Publications Script: Yoda, Yoshikata, and Yahiro Fuji, L’Intendant Sansho, in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 May 1979. Books: Anderson, Joseph, and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Rutland, Vermont, 1960; revised edition, Princeton, 1982. Ve-Ho, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1963. Mesnil, Michel, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1965. Yoda, Yoshikata, Mizoguchi Kenji no hito to geijutsu (Kenji Mizoguchi: The Man and His Art), Tokyo, 1970. Tessier, Max, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1971. Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Kenji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, New York, 1976. SANSHO DAYU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1064 Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Garbicz, Adam, and Jacek Klinowski, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Freiberg, Freda, Women in Mizoguchi Films, Melbourne, 1981. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Serceau, Daniel, Mizoguchi: De la revolte aux songes, Paris, 1983. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. McDonald, Keiko, Mizoguchi, Boston, 1984. O’Grady, Gerald, editor, Mizoguchi the Master, Ontario, 1996. Tomasi, Dario, Kenji Mizoguchi, Milan, 1998. Articles: ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Cinéma (Paris), no. 6, 1955. Richie, Donald, and Joseph Anderson, ‘‘Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1955. Godard, Jean-Luc, ‘‘L’Art de Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Arts (Paris), no. 656, 1958. ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Ecran (Paris), February-March 1958. Mizoguchi, Kenji, ‘‘Mes films,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1959. ‘‘Dossier Mizoguchi’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Sep- tember 1964. Yoda, Yoshikata, ‘‘Souvenirs sur Mizoguchi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1967. Yoda, Yoshikata, ‘‘The Density of Mizoguchi’s Scripts,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), Spring 1971. Wood, Robin, ‘‘The Ghost Princess and the Seaweed Gatherer,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1973. Coleman, John, in New Statesman (London), 20 February 1976. Cohen, R., ‘‘Mizoguchi and Modernism,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Spring 1978. Bokanowski, H., ‘‘L’Espace de Mizoguchi,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1978. Andrew, Dudley, and Tadao Sato, ‘‘On Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1980. Gauthier, G., in Image et Son (Paris), April 1980. Gourdon, G., in Cinématographe (Paris), April 1980. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), November 1980. Ehrlich, L. C., ‘‘The Name of the Child: Cinema as Social Critique,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1990. Santos, A., in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 11, January 1993. Burdeau, Emmanuel, and others, ‘‘Mizoguchi Encore,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 504, July-August 1996. Lopate, Philip, ‘‘A Master Who Could Create Poems for the Eyes,’’ in The New York Times, 15 September 1996. Macnab, Geoffrey, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 8, no. 12, December 1998. *** Sansho dayu can be taken as representing the ultimate extension and one of the supreme achievements of a certain tendency in the world cinema, the tendency celebrated in the critical writings of André Bazin and associated with the term ‘‘realism.’’ The only way in which the term is useful, and not actively misleading, is if it is applied to specific stylistic options. (Clearly, Mizoguchi’s late films are not ‘‘realistic’’ in the sense in which a newsreel is ‘‘realistic.’’) The following features are relevant. 1. The Long Take, tending to the sequence-shot. Mizoguchi developed a long-take technique quite early in his career; in Japan, he was frequently criticized as old-fashioned for not adopting the editing techniques of Western cinema. One must distinguish, however, between the sequence-shots of Sisters of Gion (1936), for example, and those of Sansho dayu. As N?el Burch has convincingly argued in To the Distant Observer, the earlier type of long take, where the camera is held at a great distance from the characters, remaining static for long stretches of the action, with its occasional movements maintaining emotional and physical distance, is peculiarly Japanese, rooted in elements of a national aesthetic tradition. The sequence- shots of late Mizoguchi, on the contrary, are compatible with certain practices of Western cinema, for example, the works of Wyler, Welles and Ophüls. Whether one is content to say, with Burch, that Mizoguchi succumbed to the Western codes of illusionism, or whether one places the stress on his plastic realization of their full aesthetic and expressive potential, doubtless depends on one’s attitude to the codes themselves. 2. Camera Movement. The clinical detachment with which the camera views the characters of Sisters of Gion is replaced in the late films by an extremely complex tension between contemplation and involvement. The camera moves in the great majority of shots in Sansho dayu, sometimes identifying us with the movements of the characters, sometimes (perhaps within a single shot) withdrawing us from them to a contemplative distance. The film’s famous closing scene contains particularly beautiful examples in the two shots that frame it: in the first, the camera begins to move with Zushio at the moment he hears his mother’s voice and is drawn towards it, then cranes up to watch the movements towards reunion, until the mother is also visible within the frame; in the last shot of film, the camera moves upward away from the reunited couple, to reveal the vast seascape and the solitary figure of the old seaweed-gatherer, his task now completed. 3. Depth of field. Again and again Mizoguchi makes marvellously expressive use of simultaneous foreground and background action. That something is amiss with the priestess’s plan for the family travel by sea is subtly hinted by the presence, in distant long-shots, of a small hunched figure sinisterly scuttling away as the family walks to the water. The impact of the following sequence of the kidnapping and separation of mother and children is largely created by their being kept consistently within the frame as Mizoguchi cuts back and forth between the mother’s struggles and the children’s struggles, so that we are continuously aware of the widening distance between them. It is true that this bringing to perfection of a certain kind of cinematic art in Mizoguchi’s last period coincides with a shift to a more conservative ideological position. The rage against oppression and cruelty is still there, but it is now heavily qualified by resignation, by a commitment to notions of spiritual transcendence. However, the tradition that feeds the film is rich and complex, and one must honor—whatever one’s own political position—an art that brings such a tradition to its fullest realization. —Robin Wood SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNINGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1065 SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING UK, 1960 Director: Karel Reisz Production: Woodfall Film Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 89 minutes. Released October 1960, London. Producer: Tony Richardson; executive producer: Harry Saltzman; screenplay: Alan Sillitoe; from his own novel; photography: Fred- die Francis; editor: Seth Holt; sound: Peter Handford and Bob Jones; sound editor: Chris Greenham; art director: Ted Marshall; music: John Dankworth. Cast: Albert Finney (Arthur Seaton); Shirley Ann Field (Doreen Gretton); Rachel Roberts (Brenda); Hylda Baker (Aunt Ada); Nor- man Rossington (Bert); Bryan Pringle (Jack); Robert Cawdron (Robboe); Edna Morris (Mrs. Bull); Elsie Wagstaff (Mrs. Seaton); Frank Pettitt (Mr. Seaton); Avis Bunnage (Blowzy woman); Colin Blakely (Loudmouth); Irene Richmond (Doreen’s mother); Louise Dunn (Betty); Peter Madden (Drunken man); Cameron Hall (Mr. Bull); Alister Williamson (Policeman); Anne Blake (Civil defence officer). Awards: British Academy Awards for Best British Film, Best British Actress (Roberts) and Most Promising Newcomer (Finney), 1960. Publications Script: Sillitoe, Alan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in Masterworks of the British Cinema, London and New York, 1974. Books: Manvell, Roger, New Cinema in Britain, London, 1969. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London, 1970. Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the 60s, London, 1974. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of the British Cinema, London and New York, 1978. Gaston, George, Karel Reisz, Boston, 1980. Richards, Jeffrey, and Anthony Aldgate, editors, Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970, Oxford, 1983. Walker, Alexander, editor, No Bells on Sunday: The Journal of Rachel Roberts, London, 1984. Cattini, Alberto, Karel Reisz, Firenze, 1985. Barr, Charles, editor, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London, 1986. Hill, John, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–63, Lon- don, 1986. Articles: ‘‘From ‘Free Cinema’ to Feature Film: Interview,’’ in Times (Lon- don), 19 May 1960. Films and Filming (London), August 1960. Barr, Charles, in Granta (Cambridge), 26 November 1960. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), December 1960. Dyer, Peter John, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. ‘‘Karel Reisz: Free Czech,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Febru- ary 1961. Marcorelles, Louios, ‘‘Talking about Acting: Albert Finney and Mary Ure,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1961. Dunham, Harold, in Films in Review (New York), April 1961. Sutherland, Elizabeth, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1961. Kael, Pauline, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1961. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ‘‘Movie and Myth,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1963. Phillips, Gene, ‘‘An Interview with Karel Reisz,’’ in Cinema (Bev- erly Hills), Summer 1968. Kennedy, H., ‘‘Minute Reisz: 6 Earlier Films,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1981. ‘‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1982. Listener (London), 10 November 1983. Higson, Andrew, ‘‘Space, Place, Spectacle,’’ in Screen (London), July-October 1984. Macnab, Geoffrey, ‘‘Northern Exposure,’’ in Sight & Sound (Lon- don), vol. 7, no. 9, September 1997. *** Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has a reputation as one of British cinema’s finest achievements, a status very much dependent upon its accomplished mobilisation of qualities defined as realist by the majority of British film commentators. But the film can also be seen as a melodrama: its dramatic core, like that of romantic fiction, concerns desire and its vicissitudes and the conflict between individ- ual desire and social responsibility, elements which are even occa- sionally plotted in terms of fate, chance, and coincidence (the unwanted pregnancy; the meeting at the fairground. . . ); clearly, it is a patriarchal melodrama, since its central protagonist is a rampant male who must be ‘‘domesticated’’ by the end of the film—and there are only very occasional moments when patriarchy is resisted (for instance, in the scene when Aunt Ada and Brenda discuss abortion and men, while Arthur is cast outside, reduced to sneaking a look in through the window, an outsider confronted with this all-female world in the domestic space of the home ). On the other hand, the film seems realistic precisely because it rejects the conventional devices of cinematic melodrama: the film is emotionally understated; there is no heavily scored orchestral music track or complex expressionist mise- en-scène; and the film’s relatively loose narrative development, with little sense of a goal to be achieved, means that chance and coinci- dence are rarely experienced as such. The film encapsulates in a particularly forthright way a number of the key social anxieties and fantasies of the period: there is both an angry, anarchic confrontation with the alienation of manual labour (most clearly stated in Arthur’s opening soliloquy), and a nostalgic SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1066 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning celebration of traditional working-class cultures and communities (the two different bars in the pub in which Arthur has his drinking match at the beginning of the film are very revealing: one contains mainly older people, some of whom are having a communal sing- song around the piano; the other contains the brash dynamism of a skiffle band and Arthur’s irresponsible boozing, surrounded by much younger people). The film also struggles with middle-class fears about the increasing commodification of leisure, and the appar- ent growth of mass culture and Americanisation—with television as the major scapegoat, making clear the distinction between cultural enlightenment, or at least active participation, and cultural passivity (note Arthur’s conversation with his father when the latter is watching television). Along with numerous social problem films of the 1950s and 1960s, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning also feeds the moral panic surrounding the emergent youth cultures and the increasing legitimisation of individual self-expression (‘‘What I’m out for is a good time; all the rest is propaganda!’’ says Arthur at the start of the film), cultures articulated in terms of the generation gap, within both the family, and the wider community (Mrs. Bull, the nosey parker on the corner of the street, becomes the symbol of community as an oppressive institution, restricting Arthur’s hedonism). While social mobility is less of an issue here than in other contemporary British films, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still touches on fantasies of social betterment, the individualising of social issues, and the myth of classlessness (in the final scene of the film Doreen and Arthur look down on a new housing development, the product of 1950s affluence; for Doreen, this represents modernity, the way ahead, the possibility of a better social existence; for Arthur, however, it’s a further extension of the city into the countryside where he used to go blackberrying as a child). Looking forward to the 1960s, the film also tentatively explores the discourses of sexual liberation (which are of course revealed as decidedly ambivalent for women). Like so many of the films of Britain’s new wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the film was an adaptation, this time from the successful novel of the same name by the working-class writer Alan Sillitoe. Much of the critical acclaim for the film has concerned its depictions of working-class characters as real, psychologically rounded characters. Clearly, by adopting the point-of-view of a factory worker and focussing on his milieu, the film is a powerful achievement in this respect. But the film also constructs another more problematic point- of-view, the sympathetic gaze of a class outside the city, looking from SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATIONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1067 a safe distance at the working class who become heroic victims of the city, desiring to escape to the ‘‘better’’ culture and environment of the onlooker, who is thus placed in a position of superiority. Ironically, from this point-of-view, outside and above the city (sometimes literally, as in the scene where Arthur and Brenda meet to discuss her failed attempts at getting rid of the unwanted baby, or in the brief shots which precede Arthur’s second soliloquy and the ‘‘Sunday morning’’ section of the film), the city becomes a beautiful aesthetic object, a spectacular visual image. As the reviewer in the top people’s paper, The Times, unwittingly comments, ‘‘Mr. Reisz’s direction for most of the time beautifully reflects working-class life in the back- streets of Nottingham.’’ In the end, however, it is this conflict in points-of-view and social positions which makes this film such an interesting and important work. —Andrew Higson SAVAGE NIGHTS See NUITS FAUVES SAWDUST AND TINSEL See GYCKLARNOS AFTON SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION USA, 1932 Director: Howard Hawks Production: Atlantic Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 99 minutes. Released April 1932, New York. Filmed during Spring and Summer 1931. Producers: Howard Hughes and Howard Hawks; screenplay: Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, and W. R. Burnett, with Fred Palsey, from the novel by Armitage Trail; assistant director: Rich- ard Rosson; photography: Lee Garmes and L. W. O’Connell; editor: Edward Curtis; sound: William Snyder; production designer: Harry Olivier; music: Adolph Tandler and Gus Arnheim. Cast: Paul Muni (Tony Camonte); Ann Dvorak (Cesca Camonte); Karen Morley (Poppy); Osgood Perkins (Johnny Lovo); Boris Karloff (Gaffney); George Raft (Guido Rinaldo); Vince Barnett (Angelo); C. Henry Gordon (Inspector Guarino); Ines Palance (Tony’s mother); Edwin Maxwell (Commissioner); Tully Marshall (Editor); Harry J. Vejar (Big Louis Costello); Bert Starkey (Epstein); Henry Armetta (Pietro); Maurice Black (Sullivan); Purnell Pratt (Publisher); Charles Sullivan and Harry Tembrook (Bootleggers); Hank Mann (Worker); Paul Fix (Gaffney hood); Howard Hawks (Man on bed); Dennis O’Keefe (Dance extra). Publications Script: Hecht, Ben, and others, Scarface, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January 1973. Books: Bogdanovitch, Peter, The Cinema of Howard Hawks, New York, 1962. Missiaen, Jean-Claude, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1966. Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks, London, 1968; revised edition, 1981. Gerber, Albert B., Bashful Billionaire, New York, 1968. Bergman, Andrew, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films, New York, 1971. Gili, Jean A., Howard Hawks, Paris, 1971. McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA, London, 1972. Druxman, Michael B., Paul Muni: His Life and Films, New York, 1974. Lawrence, Jerome, Actor—The Life and Times of Paul Muni, New York, 1974. Parish, James Robert, and Steven Whitney, The George Raft File: The Unauthorized Biography, New York, 1974. Yablonsky, Lewis, George Raft, New York, 1974. Willis, D. C., The Films of Howard Hawks, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1975. Clark, Norman H., Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition, New York, 1976. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pic- tures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977. Murphy, Kathleen A., Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Clarens, Carlos, Crime Movies: An Illustrated History, New York, 1980. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres, New York, 1981. Jenkins, Steve, The Death of a Gangster, London, 1982. McBride, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks, Berkeley, 1982. Mast, Gerald, Howard Hawks, Storyteller, New York, 1982. Poague, Leland, Howard Hawks, Boston, 1982. Simsolo, No?l, Howard Hawks, Paris, 1984. Martin, Jeffrey Brown, Ben Hecht: Hollywood Screenwriter, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Branson, Clark, Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study, Los Angeles, 1987. Hillier, Jim, Howard Hawks: American Artist, Champaign, 1997. McCarthy, Todd, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, New York, 1997. Gandini, Leonardo, Howard Hawks: Scarface, Torino, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 20 May 1932. Variety (New York), 24 May 1932. SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1068 Wright, C. M., in Christian Century (Chicago), 3 August 1942. Rivette, Jacques, and Fran?ois Truffaut, ‘‘Howard Hawks,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1956. Jacobs, Jack, ‘‘Paul Muni,’’ in Films in Review (New York), Novem- ber 1961. Agel, Henri, ‘‘Howard Hawks,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, no. 4, 1962. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘The World of Howard Hawks,’’ in Films and Filming (London), July and August 1962. ‘‘Hawks Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1963. Warshow, Robert, ‘‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero,’’ in The Immediate Experience, New York, 1970. Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), June 1971. ‘‘Hawks Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), May-June 1973. Kj?rup, S., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), August 1973. Frezza, G., in Filmcritica (Rome), May 1974. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), January 1975. Cooney, K., ‘‘Demonology,’’ in Movietone News (Seattle), April 1975. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 15 October 1979. Mank, Gregory William, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Pulleine, Tim, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1980. Jourdat, A., in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1980. Marinero, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), July-August 1981. Dominicus, M., in Skrien (Amsterdam), Summer 1984. Cinéma (Paris), no. 423, 6 January 1988. Vergerio, F., in Revista Del Cinematografo (Rome), vol. 63, April supp. 1993. *** Scarface was one of the three major films (along with Little Caesar and Public Enemy) that defined the American gangster genre in the early 1930s. Of the three, Scarface was simultaneously the most violent and most humorous; it was also the most controversial. Its gleeful depiction of the gangster’s life as brutal fun lacked the mean, growing swagger of Little Caesar and the sociological analysis of Public Enemy. For two years, Howard Hughes, the film’s producer, battled with the industry’s censors, who only allowed the film’s release with the deletion of some scripted material (for example, a scene showing an elected public official as a paid collaborator of the gangsters) and the addition of other material (a morally sententious scene in which the newspaper publisher implores a group of public- spirited citizens to stop the gangster menace by taking some sort of public action on election day). Even with the censorship and the changes, the film was cited as an example of what the industry would try to avoid when it implemented its Hollywood Production Code two years later. As a result of the controversy, the film has been seen far less often in America (especially on television) than the other two major gangster films, and for decades the film could only be shown legally in Europe. (Hughes’s death allowed his estate to find an American distributor for it.) Much of the power of Scarface derives from its director, Howard Hawks, and the choices he made. Rather than make a film of snarling gangsters, he decided to treat the gangsters as children playing games, having fun—since Hawks felt that the gangsters who talked to him about their adventures always sounded like children. Another Hawks decision was to turn the leading gangster’s affection for his sister into a repressed, unexplored, and unarticulated form of incest so that the gangster himself does not understand the power and shape of his feelings for her. As Hawks told his chief writer for the film, Ben Hecht, the intention was to get the Borgia family into Chicago, and the script for the film made explicit references to incest and the Borgias (scenes either deleted by the censors or removed by Hawks himself, who preferred to give less away). The incest motif underlies the plot of the film, as the leading gangster, Tony Camonte, kills his best friend, Guido Rinaldo, because he believes Guido is sleeping with his sister. In casting his film, Hawks found several minor or unknown players to fit the roles. Paul Muni, a noted actor from New York with roots in the Yiddish theater, played his first major film role as Tony Camonte. Hawks claimed that he found George Raft, who played Tony’s best friend, at a prizefight. Raft’s nervous, perpetual flipping of a coin occurs for the first time in this film; the action has since become a cultural icon of movie gangsterism, duplicated decades later in the ‘‘Broadway Melody’’ ballet of Singin’ in the Rain, when two dancing thugs flip coins in unison, and by a minor thug in Some Like It Hot, an act which occasions George Raft himself to ask, ‘‘Where’d you learn that cheap trick?’’ For the role of Cesca Camonte, Tony’s sister, Hawks found Ann Dvorak, a lithe, sharp- talking mixture of toughness and softness who would become the prototype for all Hawksian women in future films. And for the role of ‘‘Dope,’’ Tony’s comic ‘‘seckatary,’’ Hawks found the quirky char- acter actor Vince Barnett, who provides most of the film’s comedy by being a secretary who cannot write and can never even remember who the caller is or what the message might be. The overall shape of Scarface reveals the classic narrative of the gangster’s rise and fall, roughly patterned on the same tragic model as Shakespeare’s Macbeth: the gangster climbs to the top by taking action against his betters, then falls from that summit when he is deserted by his own allies and underlings. The first scene of the film is one of its most memorable, a very lengthy traveling shot, extended in both time and space, in which we watch a shadowy, whistling figure (only later identified as Tony) murder the gangster who then sits at the ‘‘top of the world.’’ At the end of the film Tony himself will be gunned down (by the police, not by one of his own), and as he dies in the gutter an electric sign above him ironically flashes, ‘‘The World Is Yours—Cook’s Tours.’’ The shadowy irony of the film’s opening shot and the cynical irony of its final image enclose a narrative full of other ironic, comic, or subtle touches that are clearly lacking from the other major films of this type. Tony’s fall is precipitated not by the forces of law in the film (who are shown to be totally inept or unable to contain the gangster menace) but by Tony himself. The murder of his best friend (like Macbeth’s murder of Banquo) and the death of his sister, whom he loved not wisely but well, lead to his emotional breakdown and collapse. His resolution to die ‘‘with harness on his back,’’ like Macbeth, shooting gleefully at the police from his heavily armored lair, collapses when his sister dies from a stray police bullet—turning Tony into a puling, weeping coward. Among the other memorable scenes in the film is a violently comic sequence which juxtaposes the brutal crashing of machinegun bullets, spraying a restaurant with deadly destruction, with Dope’s comic attempts to take a telephone message for Tony. Dope keeps complaining that he is unable to hear the message because of all the noise from the crashing glass around him. This method of deflection dominates the film to produce its wry, ironic, understated tone; deflecting a scene from a brutal gun battle to a comic telephone conversation, deflecting emotion from brutal words to a flipping coin, deflecting Tony’s motivation to a smothered and incomprehensible love for his own sister, deflecting the gangster menace to a series of childhood games. THE SCARLET EMPRESSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1069 The irony and deflection not only make Scarface unique among gangster films but make it consistent with the other films of its director, Howard Hawks. Hawks enjoys depicting the lives of profes- sionals who do their work well and love what they do. In this film, those professionals are gangster. Hawks also comments on a related group of professionals in the film—newspaper reporters and editors— who do not condemn the gangster menace but excitedly exploit the gangsters’ activities—to sell more newspapers. Hawks would return to this theme—the conflict between morality and professionalism in the newspaper world—in His Girl Friday. Still another of the film’s delights (equally true of Public Enemy and Little Caesar) was the pleasure of simply listening to the private lingo and argot of tough gangsters. The gangster film was born with the talkies, at least partially because listening to the slang was a major delight of the genre. —Gerald Mast THE SCARLET EMPRESS USA, 1934 Director: Josef von Sternberg Production: Paramount Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 109 minutes. Released 7 September 1934. Screenplay: Josef von Sternberg, adapted from a diary of Catherine the Great by Manuel Komroff; photography: Bert Glennon; produc- tion designers: Hans Dreier, Peter Balbusch, and Richard Kollorsz; music arrangers: John Leipold and W. Frank Harling; additional music: Josef von Sternberg; special effects: Gordon Jennings; cos- tume designer: Travis Banton. Cast: Marlene Dietrich (Sophia Fredericka, or Catherine II); John Lodge (Count Alexei); Sam Jaffe (Grand-Duke Pierre); Louise Dresser (Elizabeth); Maria Sieber (Catherine as a child); C. Aubrey Smith (Prince August); Ruthelma Stevens (Countess Elizabeth); Olive Tell (Princess Johanna); Gavin Gordon (Gregory Orloff); Jameson Tho- mas (Lieutenant Ovtsyn); Hans Von Twardowski (Ivan Shuvolov); Erville Anderson (Chancelor Bestuchef); Marie Wells (Marie); Edward Van Sloan (Herr Wagner). Publications Books: Harrington, Curtis, An Index to the Films of Josef von Sternberg, London, 1949. Griffith, Richard, Marlene Dietrich—Image and Legend, New York, 1959. von Sternberg, Josef, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, New York, 1965. Sarris, Andrew, The Films of Josef von Sternberg, New York, 1966. Josef von Sternberg: Dokumentation: Eine Darstellung, Mann- heim, 1966. Weinberg, Herman G., Josef von Sternberg, Paris, 1966; as Josef von Sternberg: A Critical Study, New York, 1967. Baxter, John, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, New York, 1971. Mérigeau, Pascal, Josef von Sternberg, Paris, 1983. Navacelle, Thierry de, Sublime Marlene, London, 1984. Seydel, Renate, Marlene Dioetrich: Eine Chronik ihres Lebens in Bilden und Dokumenten, East Berlin, 1984. Walker, Alexander, Dietrich, London, 1984. Spoto, Donald, Falling in Love Again: Marlene Dietrich, Bos- ton, 1985. Dietrich, Marlene, Ich bin, Gott sei dank, Berlinerin, Frankfurt, 1987. Zucker, Carole, The Idea of the Image: Josef Von Sterberg’s Dietrich Films, Cranbury, 1988. Bowman, Barbara, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler, Westport, 1992. Del Gaudio, Sybil, Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume, Cranbury, 1993. Studlar, Gaylyn, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, New York, 1993. Baxter, Peter, Just Watch!: Sternberg, Paramount and America in 1932, London, 1994. Hanut, Eryk, I Wish You Love: Conversations with Marlene Dietrich, translated by Anne-Pauline de Castries, Berkeley, 1996. Bach, Steven, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, New York, 2000. Articles: Sennwald, Andre, in New York Times, 15 September 1934. Variety (New York), 18 September 1934. Dekobra, Maurice, ‘‘Comment Marlene Dietrich est devenue star,’’ in Cinémonde (Paris), 16 April 1939. Harrington, Curtis, ‘‘Josef von Sternberg,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October-November 1951. Knight, Arthur, ‘‘Marlene Dietrich,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1954. Weinberg, Herman G., ‘‘Josef von Sternberg,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1965. Green, O. O., ‘‘Six Films of Josef von Sternberg,’’ in Movie (Lon- don), Summer 1965. Weinberg, Herman G., ‘‘On Sternberg,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1967. Martineau, Barbara, ‘‘Thoughts on the Objectification of Women,’’ in Take One (Montreal), November-December 1970. Flinn, Tom, in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Fall 1972. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Alchemy: Dietrich [+] Sternberg,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1974. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Sternberg’s Empress: The Play of Light and Shade,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1975. Cappabianca, A., in Filmcritica (Rome), April 1976. Pulleine, Tim, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1978. Zucker, C., ‘‘Some Observations on Sternberg and Dietrich,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1980. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies, New York, 1981. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Josef von Sternberg,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1981. Jacobs, L., and R. de Cordova, ‘‘Spectacle and Narrative Theory,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Fall 1982. Viviani, C., ‘‘Marlene Mélo: Splendeurs de l’artifice,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1984. ‘‘Josef von Sternberg Section’’ of Skrien (Amsterdam), April- May 1985. SCHATTEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1070 Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 482, May 1992. Murphy, K., ‘‘Portrait of a Lady Times 2,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1993. *** The Scarlet Empress was the penultimate work in the series of six films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich for Paramount— a series made possible by the international success of The Blue Angel. The series must stand, taken in toto, as one of the most remarkable achievements within the Hollywood cinema, and The Scarlet Empress as one of its peaks, yet its relationship to that cinema is highly ambiguous. Scarcely conceivable outside the studio/star/genre sys- tem, the films were progessively unsuccessful at the box office, and increasingly frowned upon by the studio bosses. The reasons for this are complex. First, von Sternberg (like Orson Welles after him) broke the fundamental rule of classical Hollywood cinema by attempting consistently to assert himself as an ‘‘artist’’ through elaboration of a highly idiosyncratic personal style; whereas Ford, Hawks and Lang, for example, were able to develop, quite unobtrusively, personal styles that did not conflict with the law of authorial invisibility. Secondly the tone of the films proved increasingly disconcerting. On a superficial level, they seemed frivolous and cavalier (and audiences perhaps suspected that, if there was a joke, they themselves were its ultimate butt); on a deeper level the films were disturbingly intense and obsessional. Critics, committed to characteristically unsophisticated bourgeois notions of what is serious (The Blue Angel) and what isn’t (The Scarlet Empress), missed the deeper level altogether, repudiating the films as decadent exercises in ‘‘style’’ with no ‘‘content,’’ as though the two were logically separable. Von Sternberg’s own pronounce- ments have unfortunately endorsed this view, describing the film’s subjects as ‘‘fatuous’’ and declaring his own exclusive interest in ‘‘the play of light and shade.’’ Sergei Eisenstein acknowledged the influence of The Scarlet Empress on his own Ivan the Terrible (leaving aside obvious similarities of imagery, they do have the same essential subject, the perversion of sexuality into the power drive). Generally, however, the two works have been assigned to quite distinct categories: Ivan the Terrible is a work of art, The Scarlet Empress an example of ‘‘camp.’’ But in fact, a scrupulous analysis of the films will reveal that von Sternberg’s is no less serious than Eisenstein’s. The matter of levels is important. The Scarlet Empress defines meticulously the level on which it is serious and the level on which it isn’t. It is not serious about Russian history: the intermittent face- tiousness (John Lodge ridiculing Catherine’s old-fashioned notions of conjugal fidelity on the grounds that ‘‘this is the eighteenth century’’) is there to repudiate the meretricious solemnity of the Hollywood historical epic. It is serious about sexuality and gender roles. Dietrich’s complex star persona involves the difficulties sur- rounding a woman’s assertion of autonomy in a world created and dominated by men. The Scarlet Empress develops her persona to one of its extremes. The film’s imagery is amazingly dense, suggestive and systematic: for example, the dissolve from the young Catherine innocently clutching her doll to the ‘‘adult’’ doll of the Iron Maiden; or the progression from the child’s innocent question ‘‘Can I be a hangman some day?’’ through the intricate bell imagery that recurs throughout, to the moment when the adult Catherine rings the bell that is the sign for the assassination of her husband and her seizure of absolute power. The action of the film is dominated by women throughout, but by women who have accepted patriarchal roles and thereby become monstrous. Catherine herself, her natural desires frustrated and perverted, becomes the ultimate monster, cynically using her sexuality as a weapon. Her growing assumption of the male role is answered by the increasingly feminization of her husband (at the climax, she is in soldier’s uniform, he in a flowing white nightgown). The culmination is one of Hollywood’s most ambiguous and devastating happy endings: the heroine triumphs over all adversity—at the expense of her humanity, and perhaps her sanity. —Robin Wood THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA See L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTE SCHATTEN Germany, 1923 Director: Arthur Robison Production: Pan-Film for Dafu Film Verlieh; black and white, 35 mm, silent; running time: 62 minutes currently, but original version was longer. Released 1923. Schatten SCHINDLER’S LISTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1071 Screenplay: Arthur Robison and Rudolf Schneider, from an idea by Albin Grau; photography: Fritz Arno Wagner; editor: Arthur Robison; production designer: Albin Grau; original accompanying score: Ernst Riege; costume designer: Albin Grau. Cast: Fritz Kortner (Husband); Alexander Granach (Mesmerist); Ruth Weyher (Wife); Gustav von Wangenheim (Lover); Max Gülstorff, Eugen Rex and Ferdinand von Alten (Cavaliers); Fritz Rasp (Manser- vant); Lilli Herder (Maid); Karl Platen. Publications Books: Rotha, Paul, The Film Till Now, London, 1930. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Fritz Kortner, Berlin, 1970. Brand, Matthias, Fritz Kortner in der Weimarer Republik: Ann?herungsversuche an die Entwicklung eines jüdischen Schauspielers in Deutschland, Rheinfelden, 1981. Articles: Bioscope (London), 20 November 1924. Potamkin, Harry, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of the German Cinema,’’ in Cinema (New York), April 1930. Wagner, Fritz Arno, in Film Art, no. 8, 1936. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1975. Close Up (London), October 1975. Bertetto, Paolo, ‘‘Schatten: l’illusione del vedere,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), vol. 37, no. 316, November-December 1988. Cappabianca, A, ‘‘Il corpo dell’ombra,’’ in Filmcritica (Siena), vol. 47, no. 475, May 1997. *** Schatten combines with great power and unity of purpose the talents of painter Albin Grau, the film’s originator who also designed the sets and costumes, the cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner, and the director-scriptwriter Arthur Robison. The action of the film is com- pressed to one evening and, apart from an introductory title and an explanation in the middle, the story is told in entirely visual terms. The plot concerns a flirtatious wife, a jealous husband, an indiscreet lover, three philanderers and a sinister servant. Tragedy is impending; a travelling shadow theater showman hypnotizes the characters and lets them see the directions in which their follies will take them. The lesson is learned. The wife and husband are reconciled and the lover departs at dawn. The intensity of the action and the simplification of the characters is representative of Expressionism, as is the chiaro- scuro lighting which heightens the mood. An air of unreality is deliberately sought and mirror reflections take us further from the concrete action. This makes it quite easy to accept the marvellous scene of the dinner table viewed slightly from above and from the side, when the shadows of the characters stretch away from them and the magic of the unreal begins. The beautiful period settings and costumes carry a romantic air, consistent with the film’s style and action. The performances of the actors are controlled, and the powerful and dynamic Fritz Kortner dominates the film, creating a tension which never falters. Alexander Granach gives an impish performance as the Mesmerist. Though his contribution to the German Cinema was considerable, he will best be remembered as the disgruntled Commissar Kowalsky in the Garbo- Lubitsch, Ninotchka. A unity of space is preserved allowing the transactions from the dining room to hall and the corridors outside the bedroom to be effectively managed. Details impinge on our consciousness—the ropes that will bind the wife, the candelabra held by the husband, the swords that will be forced into the cavaliers’ hands, all take on a new meaning and significance. Expressionism was the simultaneous simplification and heighten- ing of mood, atmosphere, and ‘‘feeling’’ to suggest the essence of an action or thought-process. As such it was a highly subjective style— both exaggerated and neurotic. Expressionism came at the time of national tension in Germany and found its exponents in the theater as well as in literature and painting. Many of the actors from the stage were trained in Expressionist theater, and that influence is very evident in Schatten. The fact that this film was made for ordinary cinema distribution indicates how rich popular film culture was at the time. Films such as Schatten, today viewed as rare classics in cine-clubs and specialized cinemas, were in their day part and parcel of ordinary film-going entertainment. Perfect films like this were not without their influence. Much of the innovative camera work and visual style has been absorbed into the accepted techniques of the cinema. But there is a special patina which the pioneer film has that can never be transmitted and that is the excitement generated by an original and creative spirit; Schatten is unique in the history of film, and unlike anything its creator, Arthur Robison, ever attempted again. —Liam O’Leary SCHINDLER’S LIST USA, 1993 Director: Steven Spielberg Production: Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures; black and white/color, 35mm; running time: 195 minutes. Released December 1993, USA. Producer: Steven Spielberg, Gerard R. Molen; executive producer: Kathleen Kennedy; screenplay: Steven Zaillian, based on the novel Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally; photography: Janusz Kaminski; editor: Michael Kahn; assistant directors: Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Michael Helfand, Marek Brodzki, Krzystof Zbieranek; production design: Allan Starski; art directors: Ewa Skoczkowska, Maciej Walczak; music: John Williams; supervising sound editors: Charles L. Campbell, Ronald Judkins, Robert Jackson; costumes: Anna Biedrzycka-Sheppard. Cast: Liam Neeson (Schindler); Ralph Fiennes (Amon Goeth); Ben Kingsley (Itzhak Stern); Caroline Goodall (Emilie Schindler); Jona- than Sagalle (Poldek Pfefferberg); Embeth Davidtz (Helen Hirsch); SCHINDLER’S LIST FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1072 Schindler’s List Malgoscha Gebel (Victoria Klonowska); Shmulik Levy (Wilek Chilowicz); Mark Ivanir (Marcel Goldberg); Beatrice Macola (Ingrid); Andrzej Seweryn (Julian Scherner); Friedrich Von Thum (Rolf Czurda); Krzystof Luft (Herman Toffel). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Photography, Best Editing, Best Art Direction, and Best Score, 1993. Publications Book: Mott, Donald R. and Saunders, Cheryl McAllister, Steven Spielberg, New York, 1986. Fensch, Thomas, editor, Oskar Schindler and His List: The Man, the Book, the Film, the Holocaust and its Survivors, Forest Dale, 1995. Sanello, Frank, Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology, Dallas, 1996. Brode, Douglas, The Films of Steven Spielberg, Secaucus, 1997. Loshitzky, Yosefa, editor, Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspec- tives on Schindler’s List, Bloomington, 1997. Yule, Andrew, Steven Spielberg, New York, 1997. Knight, Bertram, Steven Spielberg: Master of Movie Magic, Parsippany, 1998. Palowski, Franciszek, The Making of Schindler’s List: Behind the Scenes of an Epic Film, translated by Anna Ware and Robert G. Ware, Secaucus, 1998. Perry, George, Steven Spielberg-Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998. McBride, Joseph, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, New York, 1999. Friedman, Lester D., and Brent Notbohm, editors, Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Jackson, 2000. Articles: Kauffmann, Stanley, ‘‘Stanley Kauffmann on Films: A New Spielberg,’’ in The New Republic (New York) 13 December 1993. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Topping Spielberg’s List,’’ in Time (New York) 13 December 1993. McCarthy, Todd, Variety (New York), 13 December 1993. SCHINDLER’S LISTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1073 Alter, Jonathan, ‘‘After the Survivors,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 20 December 1993. Johnson, Brian D., ‘‘Saints and Sinners,’’ in MacLean’s (Toronto), 20 December 1993. Louvish, S., ‘‘Witness,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), March 1994. Strick, P., Sight and Sound, (London), March 1994. Thomson, D., ‘‘Presenting Enamelware,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1994. White, A., ‘‘Towards a Theory of Spielberg History,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1994. Doherty, T., Cineaste (New York), no. 3, 1994. Jacobowitz, F., ‘‘Rethinking History Through Narrative Art,’’ in Cineaction (Texas), no. 34, 1994. White, Les, ‘‘My Father Is a Schindler Jew,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), no. 39, 1994. Slavin, J., ‘‘Witnesses to the Endtime: The Holocaust as Art,’’ in Metro (Victoria), no. 98, Winter 1994. Slavin, J., ‘‘The Butterflies in the Bonfire: The Holocaust as Art. Part Two,’’ in Metro (Victoria), no. 99, Summer 1994. Cardullo, B., ‘‘Schindler’s Miss,’’ in Hudson Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 1995. Weissman, G., ‘‘A Fantasy of Witnessing,’’ in Media Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, April 1995. Rosenfeld, A.H., ‘‘The Americanization of the Holocaust,’’ in Com- mentary, vol. 99, June 1995. Hansen, M.B., ‘‘Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Com- mandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,’’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996. Young, R.A., ‘‘Films, Tangos and Cultural Practices,’’ in Cinemas (Montreal), vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1996. Jayadeva, M.U., ‘‘Family Matters: The Good and the Bad in ‘HAHK,’’’ in Deep Focus, vol. 6, 1996. Skoller, J., ‘‘The Shadows of Catastrophe: Towards an Ethics of Representation in Films by Antin, Eisenberg, and Spielberg,’’ in Discourse (Detroit), no. 19.1, Fall 1996. Peacock, John, ‘‘Schindler’s List: Not All Black and White,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 4, Win- ter 1997. Jones, Alan, ‘‘Production on an Epic Scale,’’ in Radio Times (Lon- don), vol. 295, no. 3846, 18 October 1997. Gelley, O., ‘‘Narration and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler’s List,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 22, no. 2, 1997/1998. Goldstein, Warren, ‘‘Bad History is Bad for a Culture,’’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 44, no. 31, 10 April 1998. Manchel, Frank, ‘‘Mishegoss: Schindler’s List, Holocaust Represen- tation and Film History,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon), vol. 18, no. 3, August 1998. *** The initial skepticism surrounding Steven Spielberg’s directorial undertaking quickly dissipated when Schindler’s List, an alarmingly powerful and affecting tale of an unlikely German-Czech industrialist who manages to save 1100 Jews from the Nazi death camps, hit theater screens late in 1993 during the holiday season. In March of the following year, Spielberg won an Academy Award for ‘‘Best Direc- tor’’ and Schindler’s List went on to win ‘‘Best Picture.’’ But the climb to capture the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ most prestigious award—Best Director—has been a long (twenty years) and arduous one for the ‘‘wunderkind’’ filmmaker, whose 15 films to date have grossed more than four billion dollars worldwide, making him the most successful filmmaker of all time. It is not as though Spielberg hadn’t tried to capture this top Oscar before, especially when he turned to directing serious dramas like The Color Purple (1984) and Empire of the Sun (1987), both of which were based on novels, or his remake of A Guy Named Joe, an old black & white love story that he updated and retitled Always. But it was clear from these films that Spielberg was trying to find his way with his new literary directions. Film critic Brian D. Johnson noted in MacLean’s that ‘‘Spielberg’s attempt at serious drama. . . [has] been disappointing.’’ And so the idea of a Holocaust story as told by ‘‘Hollywood’s emperor of escapism’’ was, for that reviewer ‘‘at first glance, alarming,’’ since ‘‘reality has never been [his] strong suit.’’ The Schindler project actually began in 1982 when Sidney Sheinberg, MCA/Universal’s president, bought the movie rights to Thomas Keneally’s novel with Spielberg in mind. But he wasn’t ready to make it, because ‘‘in ‘82 I wasn’t mature enough,’’ Spielberg told Newsweek in 1993. ‘‘I wasn’t emotionally resolved with my life. I hadn’t had children. I really hadn’t seen God until my first child was born.’’ Novelist Keneally was the first to create a screenplay based on his own book, but when he produced nothing shorter than a mini-series, the project was turned over to screen writer Kurt Luedtke, who penned Out of Africa. After three years of diligently working on Schindler’s List, however, Luedtke gave up. At various times the project was considered by such notable directors as Syndey Pollack and Martin Scorsese, the latter of whom brought in writer-director Steven Zaillian, who made Searching for Bobby Fischer. It was Zaillian who successfully transformed Keneally’s novel into a work- able screenplay. By then, Spielberg had decided to direct Schindler’s List after filming Jurassic Park. Spielberg was quoted in a Newsweek article by David Ansen as saying, ‘‘[Making Schindler’s List] was a combination of things: my interest in the Holocaust and my horror at the symptoms of the Shoah again happening in Bosnia. And again happening with Saddam Hussein’s attempt to eradicate the Kurdish race. We were racing over these moments in world history that were exactly what happened in 1943.’’ A number of critics, including Johnson, intimated in their reviews that Spielberg’s choice in directing Schindler’s List was highly unusual, considering his previous dramatic attempts. But Spielberg had consistently tried since 1983 to rid himself of his ‘‘shark and truck’’ director’s image when he alluded to ‘‘turning to the written word’’ in his acceptance speech upon receiving the Irving G. Thalberg Award in the mid-1980s. But nothing could have been more ‘‘non- Spielbergian’’ than Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple: a stark and brooding story of an abused black woman named Ceilie who finds love, and ultimately her self-worth, in a lesbian relationship. By contrast, Schindler’s List was much less of a stretch for Spielberg, who by now realized that his previous cinematic style, noted by Donald R. Mott and Cheryl M. Saunders as ‘‘Spielbergesque,’’ was perhaps incompatible with most serious types of dramas. Spielberg had to discard his usual style of filmmaking in favor of something more congruent to the visual mood of the story, a style that would be dictated by the material itself. The end result in Schindler’s List, therefore, is a much restrained and subdued film than any of Spielberg’s previous works, something that was imposed partially by the black and white cinematography—noted by Johnson as ‘‘both appropriate and haunting’’—and the documentary style that Spielberg occasion- ally employed throughout the film, engendering critic Stanley SCIUSCIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1074 Kauffmann of The New Republic to comment, ‘‘To this end he often uses newsreel angles and newsreel cutting. Yet, he is not hand-held- nutty: where a panorama is needed—Jews in a long street assembling for deportation, Jews in a (seemingly) mile-wide file coming over a great field toward liberation—he understands how to present it and leave it alone.’’ If Schindler’s List was considered unusual material for Spielberg, it was because he was making yet another film about the Holocaust after the stunning documentary Shoah and the TV mini-series ‘‘Holo- caust.’’ It seemed as though Spielberg was treading on familiar territory, and the big marketing question was whether audiences would be receptive to yet another film about the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews. Kauffmann clearly supports Spielberg’s choice of material when he wrote, ‘‘Presumably there are at least some people who have never seen a Holocaust film and may see this one because it’s by Spielberg and [it] will have mainstream promotion.’’ In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter defends Spielberg’s subject by citing an interesting fact from film history: ‘‘For all the hundreds of movies employing World War II themes, the strange truth is that until now no major feature film has unflinchingly faced the horror of the Holocaust itself.’’ Schindler’s List was also unusual in that the controversial hero was both a German Christian and Nazi sympathizer whose life before and after the war remained relatively uneventful, further complicating the real reasons why Schindler risked his life and newfound wealth for his doomed Jewish employees. Mark Miller reported in Newsweek that when Schindler was asked why he did what he did after the war, he tersely replied, ‘‘I had no choice.’’ Sometime later, he told former prisoner Moshe Bejski, ‘‘If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn’t you help him?’’ Liam Neeson, the actor chosen to play Oskar Schindler, is quoted in a Time article by Richard Corless as saying, ‘‘I still don’t know what made him save all those lives. He was a man everybody liked. And he liked to be liked; he was a wonderful kisser of ass. Perhaps he was inspired to do some great piece of work. I like to think—and maybe it comes across in the film—that he needed to be needed.’’ Schindler’s List ranks as one of Spielberg’s greatest achievements in his growth and development as one of America’s leading contem- porary filmmakers. His choice of Irish actor Liam Neeson to play the lead ‘‘inhabits. . . Schindler with the authority of a round voiced, juggernaut con man,’’ said Kauffmann. Ben Kingsley plays the role of Itzhak Stern (a character that was a compilation of several of Schindler’s Jews), the Jewish accountant who Schindler saves from a condemned group of Jews to run his enamelware factory. Johnson described Kingsley’s performance with the words, ‘‘Quietly bril- liant,’’ while Kauffmann offers an interesting aside: ‘‘Actors who want to study the basis of acting—concentration—should watch Kingsley.’’ The only other major character in the film is Commandant Amon Goeth, played by English actor Ralph Fiennes, whom David Ansen of Newsweek observes, ‘‘finds fresh horrors that owe nothing to Hollywood clichés . . . the insecurity that Fiennes finds in the character makes him all the more frightening.’’ And Johnson adds, ‘‘Fiennes gives the movie’s most crucial performance, capturing the human psychology that permits genocide.’’ Spielberg’s weaving of these three atypical characters together within the framework of the Nazi terror is nothing short of remark- able. Schindler’s List begins at the start the Holocaust, at which point Oskar Schindler is introduced wining and dining the Nazi brass for favors. Eventually he moves to the center of the action when he sets up the enamelware factory with Stern, and later when he begins his so-called ‘‘friendship’’ with Commandant Goeth. What unfolds on the screen for the next three and a quarter hours is a striking portrait of a most unusual man undertaking the most frightening risks imaginable amid the sheer terror, brutality and ugliness of the Nazi war machine. In Alter’s article, he reprints what survivor Elie Wiesel had previously written: ‘‘How is one to tell a tale that cannot be—but must be—told? I don’t know.’’ Filmmaker Steven Spielberg knew exactly how. —Donald R. Mott SCIUSCIA (Shoeshine) Italy, 1946 Director: Vittorio De Sica Production: Alfa Cinematografica (Italy); black and white, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes; length: 8,340 feet. Released 1946. Cost: less than 1 million lire. Producer: P. W. Tamburella; screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Sergio Amidei, A. Franci, Cesare Giulio Viola, and Vittoria De Sica, from a story by Zavattini; photography: Anchise Brizzi; editor: Nicolo Lazzari; production designer: Ivo Batteli; music: A. Cicognini. Cast: Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale); Rinaldo Smordoni (Giuseppe); Amiello Mele (Raffaele); Bruno Otensi (Archangeli); Anna Pedoni (Nannarella); Enrico de Silva (Giorgio); Antonio Lo Nigro (Righetto); Emilio Cigoli (Staffera); Angelo D’Amico (The Sicilian); Antonio Carlino (Inhabitant of the Abruzzes); Francesco De Nicola (Ciriola); Pacifico Astrologo (Vittorio); Maria Campi (Palmreader); Leo Garavaglia (Commissioner); Giuseppe Spadare (The Advocate); Irene Smordoni (Giuseppe’s mother). Publications Books: Malerba, Luigi, editor, Italian Cinema 1945–51, Rome, 1951. Castello, G. C., Il cinema neorealistico italiano, Turin, 1956. Rondi, Brunello, Il neorealismo italiano, Parma, 1956. Ferrara, Giuseppe, Il nuovo cinema italiano, Florence, 1957. Hovald, Patrice G., Le Néo-Realisme italien et ses createurs, Paris, 1959. Bazin, Andre, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris, 1962; as What is Cinema (2 vols.), Berkeley, 1971. Agel, Henri, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1964. SCIUSCIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1075 Sciuscia Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1966. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, New York, 1971. Lawton, Benjamin Ray, Literary and Socio-Political trends in Italian Cinema, Los Angeles, 1971. Wlaschin, Ken, Italian Cinema Since the War, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Garbicz, Adam, and Jacek Klinowski, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Guaraldi-Rimini, Mario, editor, Neorealismo e vita nazionale: Antologia di cinema nuovo, Florence, 1975. Mercader, Maria, La mia vita con Vittorio De Sica, Milan, 1978. Anthologie du cinéma 10, Paris, 1979. Bolzoni, Francesco, Quando De Sica era Mister Brown, Turin, 1984. Darreta, John, Vittorio De Sica: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Micciche, Lino, Sciuscia di Vittorio De Sica: letture, documenti, testimonianze, Turin, Italy, 1994. Nuzzi, Paolo, and Ottavio Iemma, editors, De Sica and Zavattini: parliamo tanto di noi, Rome, 1997. Articles: Variety (New York), 22 May 1946 and 13 August 1947. Doniol-Valcroze, J., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), February 1947. New York Times, 27 August 1947. Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with De Sica,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), April 1950. Hawkins, R. F., ‘‘De Sica Dissected,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1951. De Sica, Vittorio, in Films and Filming (London), December 1955- January 1956. Sargeant, Winthrop, ‘‘Bread, Love, and Neo-Realism,’’ in New Yorker, 29 June and 6 July 1957. Rhode, Eric, ‘‘Why Neo-Realism Failed,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Poet of Poverty,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October and November 1964. Passek, J. L., ‘‘Le Cinéma du néo-réalisme italien est en berne: Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1975. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), September-Decem- ber 1975. SCORPIO RISING FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1076 Barbaro, Nick, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 22 Novem- ber 1977. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1978. Lawton, B., ‘‘Italian Neo-Realism: A Mirror Construction of Real- ity,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. Carcassone, P., in Cinématographe (Paris), January 1979. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Cahiers Lumière (Paris), November 1980. Ardanaz, S., ‘‘Sin mi Vittorio De Sica no habría pasado a las historia del cine,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), 1984. Horvilleur, G., in Cinématographe (Paris), September-October 1984. Alix, Y., ‘‘Sciuscia et Le voleur de bicyclette: les enfants nous regardent,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1985. James, Caryn, ‘‘De Sica’s Reputation Gets a Shine,’’ in The New York Times, 4 October 1991. *** Vittoria De Sica’s first major film, I bambini ci guardano, the account of a broken marriage as seen through the eyes of a child, was also his first significant attempt at the social realism which would characterize his pre-1960s films. From the beginning he explained that his films were a protest ‘‘against the absence of human solidarity, against the indifference of society towards suffering. They are a world in favour of the poor and the unhappy.’’ I bambini ci guardano was De Sica’s first collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. Their fruitful partnership produced the most admired films of neorealism— Sciuscia and Ladri di biciclette. Each is an extraordinary indictment of the social circumstances which existed during post-Fascist Italy; Sciuscia is uncompromisingly tragic, while Ladri di biciclette, tem- pered by less cruelty, conveys a sense of tenderness. Sciuscia is a neologism coined by the shoe-shine boys of Rome. These youngsters plied their trade to American soldiers who were among those few able to afford this minor luxury in a country filled with unemployment and poverty following the war. The embryo for the film was the result of De Sica’s close observation of two shoe- shine boys in the streets of Rome. He studied their habits, their hand- to-mouth existence, and their dealing in black market contraband. Inevitably, he recalled, the two boys were arrested for stealing a gas mask and sent off to a reformatory. They were victims, he said, of ‘‘the legacy from war . . . the drama was not invented by me but staged by life instead, drawing to its fatal conclusion.’’ He related his story to Zavattini, who fashioned it into a screenplay, resulting in a major neorealist film. Sciuscia emphasized the creators’ commitment to showing, through actual incidents, ‘‘the indifference of humanity to the needs of others.’’ De Sica uses two non-professional actors and the streets of Rome to tell of the two boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, who shine shoes and become involved in crime in order to raise money to buy a white horse. Their black market activities get them arrested and sent to reform school where, supposedly, they will be rehabilitated. Reforma- tory life turns out to be far more harsh and corrupt than life on the streets and in their struggle for survival they betray each other, resulting in the death of Giuseppe. The anguish of all suffering humanity is displayed in Pasquale’s unforgettable cry of despair at the end of the film. Though Sciuscia was universally hailed by critics as a work of art, it was by no means a financial success. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented De Sica with a special Academy Award describing the film as ‘‘an Italian production of superlative quality made under adverse circumstances.’’ Sciuscia was successful only in art houses and De Sica would later say, ‘‘Shoeshine was a disaster for the producer. It cost less than one million lire but in Italy few people saw it as it was released at a time when the first American films were reappearing . . . . ’’ At the time of its American release, James Agee’s first response was, ‘‘Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see.’’ Soon after he recanted these remarks, describing it as ‘‘the raw, or at its best, the roughed-out materials of art’’ rather than the perfected work of art he had first thought. Such critical reassessment has diminished the reputation of most of De Sica’s work and today he is often written off as a minor director. Yet for many, including Orson Welles, his films retain a poeticism and sincerity. In 1960, Welles said, ‘‘I ran his Shoeshine recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life . . . . ’’ —Ronald Bowers SCORPIO RISING USA, 1963 Director: Kenneth Anger Production:Color, 16mm; running time: 29 minutes. Released 1963. Filmed in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Screenplay: Kenneth Anger; photography: Kenneth Anger; editor: Kenneth Anger; music: Little Peggy March, The Angels, Bobby Vinton, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, The Crystals, The Ron-dells, Kris Jensen, Claudine Clark, Gene McDaniels, and The Surfaris. Cast: Bruce Bryon (Scorpio); Johnny Sapienza (Taurus); Frank Carifi (Leo); John Palone (Pinstripe); Ernie Allo (Joker); Barry Rubin (Fall Guy); Steve Crandall (Blondie); Bill Dorfman (Back); Johnny Dodds (Kid). Publications Books: Anger, Kenneth, Magick Lantern Cycle: A Special Presentation in Celebration of the Equinox Spring 1966, New York, 1966. Youngblood, Gene, Expanded Cinema, New York, 1970. History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema, New York, 1976. Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, New York, 1979. Landis, Bill, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger, New York, 1995. Suárez, Juan Antonio, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema, Bloomington, 1996. Articles: ‘‘Scorpio Rising Issue’’ of Film Culture (New York), Winter 1963–64. Schneeman, Carolee, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1964. Haines, Fred, in Nation (New York), 14 September 1964. SCORPIO RISINGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1077 Scorpio Rising THE SEARCHERS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1078 Dietsfrey, Harris, in Artforum (New York), 1965. ‘‘Spider Interviews Kenneth Anger,’’ in Spider (New York), 15 April 1965. Interview with Anger, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1966. Gill, Brendan, in New Yorker, 23 April 1966. Alexander, Thomas Kent, ‘‘San Francisco’s Hipster Cinema,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 44, 1967. Martin, Bruce, and Joe Medjuck, ‘‘Kenneth Anger,’’ in Take One (Montreal), no. 6, 1967. Cornwall, Regina, ‘‘On Kenneth Anger,’’ in December, no. 1, 1968. Rayns, Tony, ‘‘Lucifer: A Kenneth Anger Kompendium,’’ in Cinema (Cambridge), October 1969. Sitney, P. Adams, ‘‘The Avant-Garde: Kenneth Anger and George Landow,’’ in Afterimage (Rochester, New York), no. 2, 1970. ‘‘Kenneth Anger Issue’’ of Body Politic, April 1982. Lowry, Ed, ‘‘The Appropriation of Signs in Scorpio Rising,” in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Summer 1983. Suarez, J., ‘‘Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising: Avant-Garde Textuality and Social Performance,’’ in Cinefocus (Bloomington, Indiana), no. 2, 1992. Gariazzo, G., in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 36, no. 355, June 1996. Haug, Kate, ‘‘An Interview with Kenneth Anger,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 18, no. 4, October 1996. *** Scorpio Rising, a landmark in the American underground film, confirmed Kenneth Anger’s reputation as a major talent and, at the time of its release, created a stir which reached from the pages of New York’s Film Culture to the courts of California, where it was judged obscene. It is testimony to the film’s aesthetic power that 20 years later it continues to shock and dismay as many viewers as it amuses and exhilarates through its artfully subversive reinterpretation of the American mythos. A product of the period which produced Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip canvases, Scorpio Rising is a pop-art collage of found artifacts which submerges itself in the chrome-and-leather, skull-and-swastika iconography of the motorcy- cle cult that provides its subject. (Anger shot many scenes using an actual Brooklyn biker’s club.) Yet, almost instantly, the film extends these symbols of machismo to include the entirety of American culture via the re-reading of its popular imagery. Structured around 13 ‘‘top forty’’ songs from the period in which it was made (1962–63), Scorpio Rising mounts a dialectical collision between images and music to reveal the strains of romanticized violence, morbidity and homoeroticism just beneath the surface of ‘‘Dondi’’ and ‘‘Li’l Abner,’’ of Brando’s and Dean’s rebels, of hit tunes by Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley and Martha and the Vandellas. The juxtaposition of the Angel’s ‘‘My Boyfriend’s Back’’ with shots of a biker working on his machine, for example, not only suggests the violent eroticism and fetishization inherent to the cycle cult, but reveals the open brutality of the song’s lyrics as well, implicating the whole civilization in its imagery of obsession. And when Anger plays Bobby Vinton’s ‘‘Blue Velvet’’ over a loving tilt up a biker’s jeans as he zips his fly, the effect is both erotic and a savage parody of eroticism as it is packaged by the culture industry. Scorpio Rising’s short-circuitry of traditional readings of familiar objects ultimately represents the joyous celebration of the dawning of the Age of Scorpio, the erratic astrological sign associated with chaos, and the concomitant downfall of the ascetic and repressed reign of Christianity. In the film’s most notorious juxtaposition, Anger poses this cosmological convulsion by a clever intercutting of a black-and- white Sunday School movie of the last days of Christ (set, in part, to the Crystals’ ‘‘He’s a Rebel’’) with profanely contrasting scenes from a biker’s ‘‘Walpurgisnacht.’’ The multiple layering of subversive associations generated by Anger’s various techniques of collision provides the basically non-narrative means by which Scorpio Rising drives toward its disturbing, yet cathartic conclusion. It is a method equally explicit in his punning description of the film as ‘‘A conjura- tion of the presiding Princes, Angels and Spirits of the Sphere of MARS, formed as a ‘high’ view of the American Motorcyclist. The Power Machine seen as tribal totem, from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.’’ Clearly, Scorpio Rising has had its influence, from the found- footage collages of Bruce Conner to the pop-flash sound and color imagery of American Graffiti. Yet the film remains one of a kind in terms of the immediacy and savagery of its critique. Anger’s manipu- lations of the culturally overloaded imagery of Nazism, sado-maso- chism, and the occult finally result in a film which refuses to conform to any dominant, edifying reading whatsoever—an almost unparal- leled achievement which should earn Scorpio Rising an enduring place in the artistic annals of the 1960s, a decade remembered for the challenges it posed to ruling ideology. —Ed Lowry THE SEARCHERS USA, 1956 Director: John Ford Production: C. V. Whitney Pictures; Technicolor, 35mm, Vistavision; running time: 119 minutes. Released 1956. Filmed from February through the Summer of 1955 in Monument Valley, Utah and Colorado. Producers: Merian C. Cooper and C. V. Whitney; associate pro- ducer: Patrick Ford; screenplay: Frank S. Nugent, from the novel by Alan LeMay; photography: Winton C. Hoch and Alfred Gilks; editor: Jack Murray; sound: Hugh McDowell and Howard Wilson; art directors: Frank Hotaling and James Basevi; music: Max Steiner; special effects: George Brown; costume designers: Frank Beetson and Ann Peck. Cast: John Wayne (Ethan Edwards); Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Pawley); Vera Miles (Laurie Jorgensen); Ward Bond (Capt. Rev. Samuel Clayton); Natalie Wood (Debbie Edwards); John Qualen (Lars Jorgensen); Olive Carey (Mrs. Jorgensen); Henry Brandon (Chief Scar); Ken Curtis (Charlie McCorry); Harry Carey, Jr. (Brad Jorgensen); Antonio Moreno (Emilio Figueroa); Hank Worden (Mose Harper); Lana Wood (Debbie as a child); Walter Coy (Aaron Edwards); Dorothy Jordan (Martha Edwards); Pippa Scott (Lucy THE SEARCHERSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1079 The Searchers Edwards); Pat Wayne (Lt. Greenhill); Beulah Archuletta (Look); Jack Pennick (Private); Peter Mamakos (Futterman); Away Luna, Billy Yellow, Bob Many Mules, Exactly Sonnie Betsuie, Feather Hat, Jr., Harry Black Horse, Jack Tin Horn, Many Mules Son, Percy Shooting Star, Pete Grey Eyes, Pipe Line Begishe, Smile White Sheep (Coman- ches); Mae Marsh; Dan Borzage. Publications Books: Fenin, George, and William K. Everson, The Western from Silents to Cinerama, New York, 1962. Haudiquet, Philippe, John Ford, Paris, 1964. Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford, Berkeley, 1968; revised edition, 1978. Ricci, Mark, and Boris and Steve Zmijewsky, The Films of John Wayne, New York, 1970; revised edition, as The Complete Films of John Wayne, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1983. Baxter, John, The Cinema of John Ford, New York, 1971. Cawelti, John, The Six-Gun Mystique, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971. Place, J. A., The Western Films of John Ford, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973. Barbour, Alan, John Wayne, New York, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart, American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974. Maynard, Richard A., The American West on Film: Myth and Reality, Rochelle Park, New Jersey, 1974. Nachbar, Jack, editor, The Western, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1974. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, John Ford, New York and London, 1975. Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery, London, 1976. Eyles, Allen, John Wayne, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1979. Ford, Dan, Pappy: The Life of John Ford, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979. Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford, New York and London, 1979. Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford, London, 1981; New York, 1983. Turvey, Sarah, Barthes’ S/Z and the Analysis of Film Narrative: The Searchers, London, 1982. Kieskalt, Charles John, The Official John Wayne Reference Book, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. THE SEARCHERS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1080 Shepherd, Donald, and others, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne, London, 1985. Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films, Berkeley, 1986. Stowell, Peter, John Ford, Boston, 1986. Lepper, David, John Wayne, London, 1987. Buscombe, Ed, editor, BFI Companion to the Western, London, 1988. Levy, Emanuel, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1988. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian & Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola and Scorsese, Springfield, 1990; 1993. Darby, William, John Ford’s Westerns: A Thematic Analysis, with a Filmography, Jefferson, 1996. Davis, Ronald L., John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master, Norman, 1997. Davis, Ronald L., Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne, Norman, 1998. Girus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, New York, 1998. Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1998. Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, New York, 1999. Articles: Cutts, John, ‘‘Press Conference,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Reed, Allen C., in Arizona Highways, April 1956. Phipps, Courtland, in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1956. Anderson, Lindsay, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1956. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), September 1956. American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), November 1956. Barkun, Michael, ‘‘Poet in an Iron Mask,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1958. Barkun, Michael, ‘‘Notes on the Art of John Ford,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1962. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Five Worlds of John Ford,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1962. Mitchell, George, ‘‘The Films of John Ford,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1963. Bogdanovich, Peter, ‘‘Autumn of John Ford,’’ in Esquire (New York), April 1964. ‘‘Ford on Ford,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), July 1964. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Présence du Cinéma (Paris), March 1965. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1966. Mitry, Jean, in Interviews with Film Directors, edited by Andrew Sarris, New York, 1967. Kennedy, Burt, ‘‘Our Way West,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Pechter, William, ‘‘A Persistence of Vision,’’ in 24 Times a Second: Films and Filmmakers, New York, 1971. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Focus on Film (London), Spring 1971. Anderson, Lindsay, ‘‘John Ford,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Spring 1971. Sarris, Andrew, in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1971. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), August 1971. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, ‘‘Prisoner of the Des- ert,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1971. Ford, D., ‘‘The West of John Ford and How It Was Made,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), September-October 1971. Wollen, Peter, ‘‘The Auteur Theory,’’ in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, London, 1972. ‘‘John Ford’s Stock Company Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), Janu- ary 1972. McInery, Joe, ‘‘John Wayne Talks Tough,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September 1972. Jorgensen, U., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), June 1974. Dempsey, Michael, ‘‘John Ford: A Reassessment,’’ in Film Quar- terly (Berkeley), Summer 1975. ‘‘The Searchers Issue’’ of Screen Education (London), Winter 1975–76. Steinman, Clay, ‘‘The Method of The Searchers,” in Journal of the University Film Association, Summer 1976. Boyd, D., ‘‘Prisoner of the Night,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1976–77. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 2, no. 4, 1978. Lowry, Ed, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 2 Novem- ber 1978. Byron, S., ‘‘The Searchers: Cult Movie of the New Hollywood,’’ in New York, 5 March 1979. Henderson, B., ‘‘The Searchers: An American Dilemma,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1980–81. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies, New York, 1981. Lehman, Peter, ‘‘Added Attraction: Looking at Look’s Missing Reverse Shot: Style in John Ford’s The Searchers,” in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 4, no. 4, 1981. Sineux, M., in Positif (Paris), May 1982. Combs, Richard, in Listener (London), 3 July 1986. Yoshimoto, M., ‘‘Myth of Demystification in Structural Film Criti- cism,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (New York), no. 4, 1990. Russell, D., ‘‘The American Trauma,’’ in Movie (London), Win- ter 1990. Skerry, P. J., ‘‘What Makes a Man to Wander?: Ethan Edwards of John Ford’s The Searchers,’’ in New Orleans Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1991. Roth, M., ‘‘’Yes, My Darling Daughter’: Gender, Miscegenation, and Generation in John Ford’s The Searchers,’’ in New Orleans Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1991. Winkler, M. M., ‘‘Tragic Features in John Ford’s The Searchers,’’ in Bucknell Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1991. Walker, M., ‘‘Melodramatic Narrative,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Spring-Summer 1993. Shively, J., ‘‘Indianer gillar John Wayne,’’ in Filmhaftet (Uppsala, Sweden), May 1993. Brown, G., ‘‘Ride Away,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 38, 18 May 1993. Travers, P., ‘‘The Searchers Ride Again,’’ in Rolling Stone, no. 658, 10 June 1993. Wall, J. M., ‘‘Of Lawyers and Dinosaurs,’’ in Christian Century, vol. 110, 28 July/4 August 1993. Gallagher, T., ‘‘John Ford’s Indians,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1993. Legrand, Gérard, and others, ‘‘John Ford,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 427, September 1996. Humbert, M., ‘‘Doorways,’’ in Vertigo (Paris), no. 18, 1996. THE SEARCHERSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1081 Reid’s Film Index, no. 20, 1996. Whissel, K., ‘‘Racialized Spectacle, Exchange Relations, and the Western in Johanna d’Arc of Magnolia,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 37, no. 1, 1996. Oldmeadow, H., ‘‘Tracking The Searchers: A Survey of the Film’s Critical Reception,’’ in Continuum, vol. 11, no. 1, 1997. Thomson, David, ‘‘Open and Shut: A Fresh Look at The Searchers,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 4, July-August 1997. O’Brien, Geoffrey, ‘‘The Movie of the Century: It Looks Both Backward to Everything Hollywood Had Learned About Westerns and Forward to Things Films Hadn’t Dared to Do,’’ in American Heritage, vol. 49, no. 7, November 1998. *** A popular though critically ignored Western at the time of its release, John Ford’s The Searchers was canonized a decade later by auteur critics as the American masterpiece par excellence exerting its influence as a cinematic touchstone and ‘‘cult film’’ among such directors of the New Hollywood as Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Representing Ford’s most emo- tionally complex and generically sophisticated work, The Searchers manages to be both a rousing adventure movie and a melancholy film poem exploring the American values at the heart of the West- ern genre. At the center of the film is Ethan Edwards, a bitter, ruthless and frustrated crusader engaged in a five-year quest to retrieve a niece kidnapped by the Comanches. Edwards is perhaps John Wayne’s most accomplished characterization, bringing to bear the iconography which has made Wayne synonymous with the Western. Isolated by the violent individualism which defines his heroic status, Edwards is torn by the neurotic split inherent in the archetype: he belongs neither to the civilized community of settlers nor with the savages he fights on their behalf. A crusty, intolerant misanthrope, he occasionally betrays a wellspring of emotion which again and again is sublimated in violent action and an insane hatred of the Indian. Returning to his brother’s Texas home after many years’ absence, Edwards arrives just in time to be lured away by a Comanche trick while the homestead is burned, his brother, sister-in-law and nephew are slaughtered, and his two nieces are taken captive by the brutal chief Scar. Embarking with a posse to recover the kidnapped girls, Edwards is eventually left to pursue his search with a single compan- ion, young Martin Pawley, an eighth-blood Cherokee who was the adopted son of Ethan’s brother. Though Edwards begins by despising Pawley as a ‘‘half-breed,’’ their companionship eventually draws them together as father and son. Yet when they finally discover Debbie, the sole survivor of the raid, now grown and living as a Comanche squaw, Edwards is determined to kill her, and Pawley is forced to defy his wrath and his gun in order to save her. For all his hatred of the Comanches, Edwards is clearly aligned with them psychologically. Not only can he speak their language, but on one occasion, he shoots the eyes of a dead warrior in tacit acknowledgement of an Indian belief that this will force the man’s soul to ‘‘wander forever between the winds.’’ Further, there is a strongly sexual undercurrent to Edwards’s search, manifested on one hand by his obsession with revenge for the violation of his sister- in-law Martha, and on the other by his insistence on killing Debbie for ‘‘living with a Comanche buck.’’ His ultimate decision to spare the girl and to temper his anger thus assumes the proportions of a kind of transcendental grace. In one of the most poignant subtexts provided by any Western, The Searchers suggests a source for Edwards’s anger by hinting at his unspoken and unfulfilled love for his brother’s wife Martha. Ford subtly conveys this attachment through gesture and staging alone in the early scenes, yet extends its ramifications to inform Pawley’s treatment of Laurie, the fiancée he leaves behind. After years of waiting, Laurie finally opts for a less attractive suitor, an action which threatens to cut Pawley off from the civilized community much like Edwards. Without stating it in so many words, the film suggests that the situation echoes a frustrated romance, prior to the beginning of the story, between Edwards and Martha, who finally chose to marry his brother instead of waiting indefinitely for the man she loved. Within the auteurist context, The Searchers assumes an even greater significance. Never before in a Ford Western has the wilder- ness seemed so brutal or settlements so tenuous and threatened. There are no towns—only outposts and isolated homesteads, remote and exposed between the awesome buttes of Ford’s mythic Monument Valley. And while the Comanches are depicted as utterly ruthless, Ford ascribes motivations for their actions, and lends them a dignity befitting a proud civilization. Never do we see the Indians commit atrocities more appalling than those perpetrated by the white man. Not only does Edwards perform the only scalping shown in the film, but Ford presents the bloody aftermath of a massacre of Indian women and children carried out by the same clean-cut cavalrymen he depicted so lovingly in films like Fort Apache. The Searchers’s status as a masterpiece of the genre may finally lie in its abundant poetic imagery: a massacre presaged by a startled covey of quail, a cloud of dust and an artificially reddened sunset; the echoing voices reverberating from the towering stones surrounding men who, 40 miles from home, realize they have been drawn away so that the Comanches can attack their families; the image of Debbie running down a distant dune, unseen by the searchers whom she approaches; the repetitive tossing of objects between Edwards and the garrulous preacher/Texas Ranger Captain Clayton, conveying the delicate balance between their mutual respect and enmity; the way in which Martha strokes Edwards’s coat before their unplanned final farewell. But the most significant visual motif in The Searchers is surely the doorway open onto the wilderness. It is the image which begins and ends the film. Ford introduces Edwards through the frame of an opening doorway in the first shot of the film, and repeats the image on several occasions: once to frame (and parallel) the introduction of Pawley, and twice again with the mouth of a cave as the framing doorway. It is an image which expresses both the subject and the conflict of the film: inside the door are the values cherished by civilization; outside, in the glaring sun, is the savage land which threatens them. The Searchers’ final shot watches the reunited family walk in through the door, while Edwards remains behind, looking after them. He starts to enter, then hesitates. Realizing that he has served his purpose, that there is really no place for the western hero by the hearthside within, he turns and walks away, as the door closes behind him. —Ed Lowry SECRETS AND LIES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1082 THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN See LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAN SECRETS AND LIES UK, 1996 Director: Mike Leigh Production: Film Four (UK), CiBy 2000 (France), Thin Man Films; color (Metrocolor), 35mm; running time: 141 minutes. Released 23 April 1996 (Cannes Film Festival), 24 May 1996, United Kingdom. Filmed on location in London, England. Budget: $4.5 million (US). Producer: Simon Channing-Williams; screenplay: Mike Leigh; photography: Dick Pope; editor: Jon Gregory; production design: Alison Chitty; original music: Andrew Dickson. Cast: Timothy Spall (Maurice Purley); Brenda Blethyn (Cynthia Rose Purley); Phyllis Logan (Monica Purley); Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hortense Cumberbatch); Claire Rushbrook (Roxanne Purley); Eliza- beth Berrington (Jane); Michele Austin (Dionne); Lee Ross (Paul). Awards: Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or (Mike Leigh) and Award for Best Actress (Brenda Blethyn), 1996; Cameraimage Golden Frog Award (Dick Pope), 1996; Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association (LAFCA) Awards for Best Actress (Brenda Blethyn), Best Director (Mike Leigh), and Best Picture, 1996; Australian Film Institute Best Foreign Film Award (Simon Channing-Williams), 1997; British Academy Awards (BAFTA) Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film (Simon Channing-Williams), BAFTA Film Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Brenda Blethyn), and Best Screenplay—Original (Mike Leigh), 1997; Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture—Drama (Brenda Blethyn), 1997; Golden Satellite Award for Best Director of a Motion Picture (Mike Leigh), Best Motion Picture—Drama (Simon Chan- ning-Williams), and Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Brenda Blethyn), 1997; Humanitas Prize (U.S.) in the Feature Film Category (Mike Leigh) 1997; Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film (Mike Leigh), 1997; London Critics’ Circle ALFS Awards for British Actress of the Year (Brenda Blethyn), British Director of the Year (Mike Leigh), and British Film of the Year, 1996–97. Publications Script: Leigh, Mike, Secrets and Lies, London, 1997. Articles: Cavanagh, David, review in Empire (London), June 1996. Jones, Alan, review in Film Review (London), June 1996. Ansen, David, review in Newsweek (New York), 30 September 1996. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Family Values,’’ in Time (New York), 30 Septem- ber 1996. Quart, Leonard, ‘‘Raising Questions and Positing Possibilities: an Interview with Mike Leigh,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 22, no. 4, 1997. *** Best known for his bleak take on life in the suburbs, in Secrets and Lies Mike Leigh surprised many critics with a happy, perhaps rather sentimental ending. Besides its general point about our ability to hide our feelings even from those we love most, the film also confronts head-on an issue that remains pertinent in Britain; namely the extent to which British society is a multiethnic, multicultural one. It tells the story of Hortense, a young, black optometrist looking for her biologi- cal parents. To her surprise, her mother turns out to be a poorly educated white factory worker, living with her daughter from another relationship. Unmarried and pregnant at a young age, Cynthia was shamed into giving up her black baby at birth, and at first denies their relationship. At their first meetings Brenda Blethyn (Cynthia) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hortense) play the parts of damaged naif and young sophisticate with a rawness that has become a hallmark of Leigh’s filmmaking. Constructing the script through extensive improvisation sessions with the cast, he manages to draw from his actors a level of commitment and realism in their roles that is seldom achieved by other directors. In the case of Secrets and Lies, the two female leads were kept apart until it was necessary to film their on-screen meeting, so that the first meeting of the characters was also the first meeting of the actors. Between them the two women produce the most extraordi- nary moments in the film, such as one awkward eight-minute scene, produced in a single take, in which the pair talk in a restaurant and the bond between them grows despite their different experiences of life. Secrets and Lies, like Leigh’s other films, champions people whose ambitions are simple and honest over those who pretend sophistication and social superiority. Leigh is well known for reveal- ing in his films the dignity and extraordinary resilience of people whose lives seem mundane and uninteresting. Leigh’s fascination with the difference between the way things are and the way they appear is embodied in Secrets and Lies in the professions of Cynthia’s brother, Maurice, and her newly discovered daughter. As a profes- sional portrait photographer, Maurice’s skill with lenses involves creating illusions about his subjects. At one point, for example, he takes a photograph of a woman with a facial disfigurement, cleverly disguising her face to make her look conventionally beautiful. The art of illusion continues in his own life: Maurice and his unhappy, childless wife, Monica, live in a big house, hiding their misery behind expensive furnishings. In contrast, as an optometrist, Hortense is dedicated to improving the vision of her clients, enabling them to see the world more clearly. Through her relationship with Cynthia, Hortense helps the family to see the truth about themselves and each other. Secrets and Lies is Leigh’s fifth feature film, in a career going back to Bleak Moments in 1971, and it is arguably his lightest work for the big screen before Topsy Turvy (2000). The technique of scriptwriting by improvisation seems more accomplished here than in earlier films, and, unusually for a Leigh film, Secrets and Lies was successful at the box office and with critics outside the United Kingdom. While his SEPPUKUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1083 Secrets and Lies other films are noted for their dark humour, Secrets and Lies alter- nates between moments of heart-rending sadness, flamboyant com- edy, and situations that had cinema audiences, in Britain at least, squirming in their seats with recognition and embarrassment. —Chris Routledge SEPPUKU (Harakiri) Japan, 1962 Director: Masaki Kobayashi Production: Shochiku Co. (Kyoto); black and white, 35 mm, Shochiku GrandScope; running time: 135 minutes; length: 3,686 meters. Released 1962, Japan. Producers: Tatsuo Hosoya with Gin-ichi Kishimoto; screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, from the novel by Yasuhiko Tokigushi; photog- raphy: Yoshio Miyajima; editor: Hisashi Sagara; sound: Hideo Nishizaki; art directors: Jun-ichi Ozumi and Shigemasa Toda; music: Toru Takemitsu. Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Hanshiro Tsugumo); Shima Iwashita (Mihio Tsugumo); Akira Ishihama (Motome Chijiiwa); Yoshio Inaba (Jinai Chijiiwa); Rentaro Mikuni (Kageyu Saito); Masao Mishima (Tango Inaba); Tetsuro Tamba (Hikokuro Omodaka); Ichiro Nakaya (Hayato Yazaki); Yoshio Aoki (Umenosuke Kawabe); Jo Azumi (Ichiro Shimmen); Hisashi Igawa, Shoji Kobayashi, Ryo Takeuchi (Young samurai); Shichisaburo Amatsu (Page); Kei Sato (Masakazu Fukushima). Awards: Cannes Film Festival, Special Jury Prize, 1963. Publications Books: Richie, Donald, The Japanese Movie: An Illustrated History, Tokyo, 1966. Richie, Donald, Japanese Film Style and National Character, New York, 1971. Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. SEPPUKU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1084 Seppuku Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Blouin, Claude R., Le Chemin détourné: Essai sur Kobayashi et let cinéma japonais, Quebec, 1982. Articles: Iwabuchi, M., ‘‘Kobayashi’s Trilogy,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1962. Donaldson, Geoffrey, in Films and Filming (London), March 1963. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 23 May 1963. Martin, Marcel, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 30 May 1963. Billard, Pierre, in Cinéma (Paris), June 1963. Silke, James R., ‘‘Hakari, Koboyashi, Humanism,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), June-July 1963. Shivas, Mark, in Movie (London), July-August 1963. Cinema (Beverly Hills), August-September 1963. Labarthe, Andre S., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1963. Phillipe, Pierre, in Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1963. Ciment, Michel, in Positif (Paris), November 1963. Arnault, Hubert, in Image et Son (Paris), January 1964. Corman, Cid, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1964. Films and Filming (London), March 1965. Eyles, Allen, in Films and Filming (London), May 1965. Esnault, Philippe, in Image et son (Paris), February 1969. Blouin, Claude R., ‘‘Kobayashi: L’Homme et l’oeuvre,’’ and ‘‘Kobayashi, à l’uquam: Anarchiste ou utopiste?,’’ by G. Therien in Cinéma Québec (Montreal) February-March 1974. Tessier, Max, in Image et Son (Paris), November 1981. Sartor, F., ‘‘Harakiri: de eer van de samoerai,’’ in Film en Televisie (Brussels), February 1986. Jackiewicz, Aleksander, ‘‘Moje zycie w kinie,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), vol. 21, no. 3, March 1987. *** Seppuku marks Masaki Kobayashi’s first venture into the genre of jidai-geki (costume drama). But his choice of a historical subject entails no lessening of the distinctive social and moral preoccupations which informed the contemporary subjects of his earlier films. Rather, those preoccupations are intensified by their placement in a historical perspective, their universal relevance underlined; while in THE SERVANTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1085 the stylized conventions of the samurai ritual, Kobayashi found the ideal context for the slow, measured cadences of his cinematic language. The result was his finest film to date, a work of masterly narrative construction and outstanding visual beauty. Through an intricate pattern of flashbacks, the story is revealed to us in reverse. The ronin (masterless, hence destitute, samurai) Tsugumo, who comes seeking to be allowed to commit ritual suicide in the house of Lord Iyi, is told a cautionary tale of the fate of another ronin, Chijiwa, who had made the same request. In his turn, Tsugumo relates his own story: he already knew of Chijiwa’s brutal death, for the man was his son-in-law, and he has now come to take vengeance on the Iyi clan. The film culminates in a superbly choreographed explosion of violence. As so often in his films, Kobayashi’s concern is with the solitary, courageous individual who stands against a corrupt, inhuman and oppressive system. The vaunted samurai traditions of honor and nobility, as professed by the members of the Iyi clan, are shown to be a hollow sham, adhered to only in public view. In the film’s opening shot, a huge suit of armor, surmounted by a horned battle helmet, looms out of the mist, to eerie and impressive effect. This armor, it transpires, embodies the ancestral spirits of the Iyi household, who pay it exaggerated deference. But in the final headlong combat, Tsugumo contemptuously knocks it out of his way, then uses it as a shield. The armor, like the samurai system, is an empty show. The recurrent image in Seppuku is of Tsugumo in his black robes (having refused the white ones appropriate to the ritual suicide), seated cross-legged on the white harakiri mat in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by the massed spears of the Iyi warriors, and speaking in calm, unhurried tones. Around this image of charged stillness, the action of the film proceeds through visual compositions of intense lyrical beauty: most notably in the duel between Tsugumo and Omadaka, finest of the Iyi swordsmen, breathtakingly staged as a formal ballet of stylized, sweeping gestures amid long wind-tossed grass. Kobayashi’s coolly reticent camera perfectly matches the rhythms of his studied narrative, supported by Toru Takemitsu’s evocative score and, in the central role, a performance of epic stature from Tatsuya Nakadai. Seppuku was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1963 Cannes Festival, the first of Kobayashi’s films to become widely known in the west. It was to be equalled in visual beauty by Kaidan (Kwaidan). In his most famous film, Joiuchi, he once again made telling use of the samurai system as the epitome of an ossified, authoritarian tradition. Seppuku, though, combines both elements in unsurpassable fashion, and remains the most achieved expression of Kobayashi’s central belief that all systems, even the most malignant and entrenched, can be resisted by the power of ‘‘sheer human resilience.’’ —Philip Kemp THE SERVANT UK, 1963 Director: Joseph Losey Production: Springbok Films-Elstree; black and white; running time: 115 minutes; length: 10,382 feet. Released 1963. The Servant Producers: Joseph Losey, Norman Priggen; assistant director: Roy Stevens; screenplay: Harold Pinter, from the novel by Robin Maugham; photography: Douglas Slocombe; editor: Reginald Mills; sound: John Cox, Gerry Hambling; sound recordist: Buster Ambler; art directors: Richard Macdonald, Ted Clements; music: John Dankworth. Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Barrett); James Fox (Tony); Wendy Craig (Susan); Sarah Miles (Vera); Catherine Lacey (Lady Mounset); Richard Vernon (Lord Mounset); Ann Firbank (Society Woman); Doris Knox (Older Woman); Patrick Magee (Bishop); Alun Owen (Curate); Jill Melford (Young Woman); Harold Pinter (Society Man); Derek Tansley (Head Waiter); Gerry Duggan (Waiter); Brian Phelan (Irishman); Hazel Terry (Woman in Big Hat); Philippa Hare (Girl in Bedroom); Dorothy Bromley (Girl outside Phone-box); Alison Seebohm (Girl in Pub); Chris Williams (Coffee Bar Cashier). Awards: British Film Academy Awards for Best Black and White Cinematography, Best British Actor (Bogarde), Most Promising Newcomer Actor (Fox). Publications Script: Pinter, Harold, The Servant, in Five Screenplays, London, 1971. THE SERVANT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1086 Books: Leahy, James, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, New York, 1967. Baker, William, and Stephen Ely Tabachnick, Harold Pinter, Edin- burgh, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema, London, 1974. Hinxman, Margaret, and Susan D’Arcy, The Films of Dirk Bogarde, London, 1974. Bogarde, Dirk, Snakes and Ladders, London, 1978. Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey, Paris, 1979; London, 1985. Hirsch, Foster, Joseph Losey, Boston, 1980. Klein, Joanne, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays, Columbus, Ohio, 1985. Carbone, Maria Teresa, I luoghi della memoria: Harold Pinter sceneggiatore per il cinema di Losey, Bari, 1986. Tanitch, Robert, Dirk Bogarde: The Complete Career Illustrated, London, 1988. Palmer, James, and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, New York, 1993. Caute, David, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, New York, 1994. Articles: Variety (New York), 11 September 1963. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), December 1963. Dyer, Peter John, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1963. Taylor, John Russell, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1963–64. Losey, Joseph, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1964, and June 1964. Losey, Joseph, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1964. Callenbach, Ernest, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Autumn 1964. Ross, T. J., ‘‘The Servant as Sex-Thriller,’’ in Renaissance of the Film, edited by Julius Bellone, New York and London, 1970. Brighton Film Review, February 1970. Image et Son (Paris), no. 274, 1973. Finetta, U., ‘‘Tra il vecchio e il nuovo una varieta di simbola morbosi,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), August 1979. Riley, Michael M., and James W. Palmer, ‘‘An Extension of Reality: Setting as Theme in The Servant,” in Mise-en-Scène (New York), Spring 1980. Weiss, J., ‘‘Screenwriters, Critics, and Ambiguity: An Interview with Joseph Losey,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 13, no. 1, 1983. Tronowicz, H., ‘‘W kregu sylogizmow moralnych Josepha Loseya,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), March 1985. ‘‘Losey Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), July-August 1985. Medhurst, Andy, ‘‘Dirk Bogarde,’’ in All Our Yesterdays, edited by Charles Barr, London, 1986. Listener (London), 7 January 1988. Amiel, Vincent, ‘‘Le désir, et la subtilité des gris,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 370, December 1991. Piazzo, Philippe, ‘‘Une absurde simplicité,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2308, 6 April 1994. Gardner, C., ‘‘Naturalism, Immanence and the Primordiality of Class: Deleuze’s ‘Impulse-Image’ and the Baroque Intriguer in Joseph Lousey’s The Servant,” in Iris (Iowa City), no. 23, Spring 1997. *** The Servant marks the beginning of the extremely fruitful Losey- Pinter relationship, although in fact Pinter had originally scripted Robin Maugham’s novel (in which Losey had always been interested) for Michael Anderson. When Pinter first took his script to Losey he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the latter’s reaction but, after this rocky start, the two produced one of the finest works in both their oeuvres. The film also launched Sarah Miles and James Fox, re-invigorated the career of cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, and marked Bogarde’s final, decisive break with his matinee idol image (though Losey had also cast Bogarde rather against type some years earlier in The Sleeping Tiger). Given Losey’s abiding interest in relations of class and power it is hardly surprising that he should have been drawn to this story of a servant, Barrett, who is taken on by an effete young Englishman, Tony, and gradually takes over his master’s life. Barrett is aided by his girlfriend Vera, who seduces Tony and eventually displaces his financée Susan, who eventually abandons this household in which master and servant have eventually achieved some kind of equality in degradation. In many ways The Servant can be seen as a continuation of Eve. Both chart a process of degeneration, and the destruction of one character by another. More specifically, the destroyer in each case belongs to a traditionally exploited and downtrodden social group, has learned the hard way how the world works, and takes revenge through sex. In another respect, the film might be seen as a re-working of the Faust legend or even of The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, this would be to ignore a crucial aspect of the film, namely that by the end of the film all the major characters (with the possible exception of Susan) have been morally destroyed. Losey is not so simple-minded as to stage a simple victory of Barrett over Tony; rather he shows how the rigid English class system corrupts all human relationships by turning them into a form of warfare in which the roles of aggressor and victim seem constantly to be shifting. Thus Tony is weak and rather foolish but nonetheless in a powerful social situation because of his class position. Barrett, on the other hand, belongs to a subordinate class, but one which is needed by Tony and his ilk, and knows how to play on that need. The kernel of this relationship is beautifully conveyed in their very first meeting, Tony asleep after too much to drink at lunchtime discreetly woken by Barrett’s deliberate, soft cough but probably unaware (unlike the viewer) of the faintly superior smile which flickers across Barrett’s face. The film is haunted by triangular relationships (the most obvious one being between Barrett, Tony, and Susan) whose terms are constantly shifting but all of which are ultimately destructive of all concerned. Indeed, Losey seems to be suggesting that it is not just the rigidity of the class system which is at fault here, but human psychology itself. As James Leahy perceptively put it in The Cinema of Joeph Losey, ‘‘the house in which the drama is acted out grows into a womb-like prison in which Tony and Barrett, master and servant, boss and worker, and, at times homosexual couple in a sado-masochistic relationship, husband and wife, son and mother even, are bound inseparably together by bonds of knowledge, hate, guilt and love from which they have not the strength of will to escape . . . . The ambiguity of Losey’s symbolism here results from no confusion on his part: he is expressing the underlying identity of all relationships—sexual, mari- tal, economic, political—which involve servility or exploitation rather than the co-operative and collaborative efforts of free individu- als. Thus The Servant lends itself to both a socio-political and psycho- analytical interpretation.’’ As in plays such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker Pinter’s spare, elliptical dialogue, with its pauses and silences, is the perfect vehicle for expressing the unspoken dynamics of human relationships SHAFTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1087 and for establishing a pervasive sense of menace and unease. More important still, however, is Losey’s masterly direction, elaborate yet tightly controlled and never merely decorative. Particularly impres- sive is Losey’s consistent use of circular motifs which complement the film’s triangular relationships and underline its essentially circu- lar plot structure. Thus the house itself is circular, as are the opening and closing shots, and so on. At the same time Losey accentuates the changing nature of the relationship between Barrett and Tony by changes in the look, tempo, and structure of the film. In particular he works subtle alterations on the physical space of the house itself. As he put it, the house is the ‘‘central icon, an index of the characters’ taste, their place in society, and their relationship to each other. The house assumes different personalities during the course of the film, reflecting the evolution of the master-servant contract.’’ —Julian Petley THE SEVEN SAMURAI See SHICHININ NO SAMURAI THE SEVENTH SEAL See DET SJUNDE INSEGLET SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS See TENI ZABYTYKH PREDKOV SHAFT USA, 1971 Director: Gordon Parks Production: MGM, Shaft Productions Ltd.; distributed by MGM- UA; color, 35mm; running time: 98 minutes. Released July 1971, USA. Cost: $1.5 million. Producers: Joel Freeman, David Golden (associate); screenplay: Ernest Tidyman, John D. F. Black; cinematography: Urs Furrer; editor: Hugh Robertson; sound: Lee Bost, Hal Watkins; art direc- tor: Emanuel Gerard; costume designer: Joseph Aulisi; original music: Isaac Hayes; makeup: Martin Bell; casting: Judith Lamb. Cast: Richard Roundtree (John Shaft); Moses Gunn (Bumpy Jonas); Charles Cioffi (Lieutenant Victor Androzzi); Christopher St. John Shaft (Ben Buford); Gwenn Mitchell (Ellie Moore); Lawrence Pressman (Sergeant Tom Hannon); Victor Arnold (Charlie); Sherri Brewer (Marcy Jonas); Rex Robbins (Rollie); Camille Yarbrough (Dina Greene); Margaret Warncke (Linda); Joseph Leon (Bryan Leibowitz); Arnold Johnson (Cul); Dominic Barto (Patsy); George Strus (Car- men); Edmund Hashim (Lee); Drew Bundini Brown (Willy); Tommy Lane (Leroy); Al Kirk (Sims); Shimen Ruskin (Dr. Sam); Antonio Fargas (Bunky). Awards: Oscar Award for Best Music, Song (Isaac Hayes), 1972; Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score (Isaac Hayes), 1972; Grammy Award for Best Original Score written for a Motion Picture (Isaac Hayes), 1972; MTV Movie Award for Lifetime Achievement (Richard Roundtree), 1994. Publications Books: Tidyman, Ernest, Shaft, New York, 1971. Parish, James, Black Action Films, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1989; revised, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1993. Guerrero, Ed, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Philadelphia, 1993. Belton, John, American Cinema/American Culture, New York, 1994. SHAFT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1088 James, Darius (a.k.a. Dr. Snakeskin), That’s Blaxploitation! Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury), New York, 1995. Martinez, Gerald, Diana Martinez, and Andres Chavez, What It Is. . . What It Was! The Black Film Explosion of the 70s in Words and Pictures, New York, 1998. Articles: Bannon, Barbara, ‘‘What’s Happening to Ernest Tidyman’s ‘Shaft’ On the Way to the Screen,’’ in Publishers Weekly, April 1971. Canby, Vincent, ‘‘‘Shaft’—At Last, a Good Saturday Night Movie,’’ in New York Times, 11 July 1971. Oberbeck, S. K, ‘‘Black Eye,’’ in Newsweek, 19 July 1971. Riley, Clayton, ‘‘A Black Movie for White Audiences?’’ in New York Times, 25 July 1971. Elson, John T, ‘‘Black Moses,’’ in Time, 20 December 1971. *** ‘‘He’s cool and tough. He’s a black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks. He doesn’t take orders from anybody, black or white, but he’d risk his neck for his brother man. I’m talkin’ about Shaft. Can you dig it?’’ These lines, from Isaac Hayes’ Oscar Award-winning ‘‘Theme from Shaft,’’ serves as a good introduction to Richard Roundtree’s African American hero/rebel/icon John Shaft, eponymous star of the wildly successful 1971 feature film directed by Gordon Parks. One of the first entries to fall under the controversial heading of ‘‘blaxploitation’’ cinema, Shaft followed directly on the heels of Martin Van Peeble’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971), and is widely acknowledged as the film which initiated the black film explosion of the 1970s (along with Superfly, directed by Parks’ son, and released one year later). Shaft’s screenplay was written by Ernest Tidyman, author of a series of popular detective novels featuring the film’s protagonist. (Tidyman would go on to win an Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1972 for his work on William Friedkin’s The French Connection.) After the success of Sweetback, MGM gave Parks the go-ahead—and a modest (even for the time) $1.5 million budget—for a project which would hopefully capitalize on the fast-emerging black market. Parks was already an extremely accomplished individual, having a reputa- tion as one of America’s preeminent still photographers of African descent (his work appeared in Life magazine from the 1940s through the late 1960s), as well as being an esteemed author, composer, and filmmaker. In 1969, Parks became the first African American to direct a major studio production, the autobiographical The Learning Tree. Parks wanted a fresh face to play the lead role in his new film, and found exactly what he was looking for in Roundtree, a former Ebony model and occasional theatre actor whose looks, ability, and physical presence provided just the right combination of machismo, virility, and confidence for the part. Shaft’s convoluted plot is actually fairly standard hard-boiled detective fare. After inadvertently causing the death of a gangster who showed up at his office for some unexplained reason, John Shaft is coerced by a pair of white police inspectors to help them gather information about a gang war rumored to be taking place in Harlem. Meanwhile, a drug-dealing black godfather, Bumpy Jonas (played wonderfully by Moses Gunn), hires Shaft to save his daughter from the people who have recently kidnapped her. This turns out to be the Italian mafia, so with the help of a former comrade (Ben Buford, played by Christopher St. John) and his cadre of black nationalist followers, Shaft undertakes a dangerous but ultimately successful rescue mission. All of this non-stop action is interrupted by dated romantic interludes (Shaft seems to have no qualms about cheating on his girlfriend, and proves himself an equal-opportunity lover), and opportunities for Shaft to make whitey look square, stupid, or worse. If ever there existed a film in which the narrative is simply a vehicle for showcasing a particular character, Shaft is it. Together, Tidyman, Parks, and Roundtree created a strong black hero who—for the first time in Hollywood cinema—made his own rules, listened to no one, gave the orders instead of taking them, and was not in the least afraid of making jokes at the expense of white authority figures. It is worth comparing Roundtree’s character with those so often portrayed by legendary African American thespian Sidney Poitier, figures who were polite, elegant, and generally acceptable to caucasian audiences. Shaft’s revolutionary implications are inadvertently revealed in the press booklet accompanying its release, which protests (too strongly) that the film ‘‘has a black hero, but don’t confuse that with a message— it’s for fun!’’ Despite its subversive protagonist and militant under- tones, Shaft did remarkable business among both black and white audiences, eventually grossing over $23 million at U.S. box offices alone. Such broad-ranging success can only be explained by the fact that Shaft is perfectly comfortable in any situation, with people of every stripe (including a blatantly typecast homosexual bartender, who feels compelled to pinch his butt), and that his magnetism and coolness under fire transcend mere color boundaries. None of this, however, is to say that Parks’ film escaped all criticism. Like so many of its blaxploitation offspring, Shaft was accused of perpetuating negative stereotypes of African Americans, including promiscuity, immorality, and a propensity towards vio- lence. In another vein, black cultural critics such as Darius James have argued that Shaft—which originally had a white man in the title role—is merely ‘‘a conventional action film for general audiences, enlivened by its Black cast members.’’ In interviews, Martin Van Peebles concurs with this assessment and goes even further, asserting that while John Shaft is allowed to be flamboyant and do little things, the film’s subliminal message is actually counterrevolutionary—that a white authority figure (the police commissioner) is still there hovering over him, simply tolerating his excesses. Whether Shaft is of any political or ideological value for African Americans remains a debatable issue. What cannot be denied is the impact the picture has had on later black (and white) filmmakers. Boyz N The Hood (1991) director John Singleton eloquently sums up this complex legacy when he writes, ‘‘Mind you, it’s not a perfect movie. But. . . you have a whole generation totally influenced by the image of a Black man walking down the street in a leather coat, walking through Harlem; the close-ups on his face.’’ And it should not be forgotten that Hayes’ score for the film was groundbreaking in that here, music effectively led the narrative. Following on the heels of Shaft’s success, Parks, Tidyman, and Roundtree collaborated on a sequel in 1972, Shaft’s Big Score! John Guillermin’s Shaft In Africa arrived in theatres the next year. And with a blaxploitation revival gaining steam in the late 1990s (Original Gangstas, Jackie Brown), Roundtree—who made only $13,000 for his work in the original—is slated to reprise his signature role in Singleton’s Shaft Returns (2000). —Steven Schneider SHAKESPEARE IN LOVEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1089 SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE USA, 1998 Director: John Madden Production: Bedford Falls Productions, Miramax Films, Universal Pictures; color, 35mm, Super 35; running time: 122 minutes. Filmed in London, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, England. Cost: $25 million. Producer: Marc Norman, David Parfitt, Harvey Weinstein, Edward Zwick, Donna Gigliotti, Bob Weinstein (executive), Julie Goldstein (executive), Linda Bruce (associate); screenplay: Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard, with passages from the plays of William Shakespeare; cinematographer: Richard Greatrex; editor: David Gamble; music: Stephen Warbeck; casting: Michelle Guish; production design: Martin Childs; art direction: Steve Lawrence, Mark Raggett; set decoration: Jill Quertier; costume design: Humberto Cornejo, Sandy Powell; makeup: Veronica Brebner. Cast: Joseph Fiennes (William Shakespeare); Gwyneth Paltrow (Viola De Lesseps); Geoffrey Rush (Philip Henslowe); Judi Dench (Queen Elizabeth); Simon Callow (Tilney, Master of the Revels); Colin Firth (Lord Wessex); Imelda Staunton (Nurse); Tom Wilkinson (Hugh Fennyman); Ben Affleck (Ned Alleyn); Martin Clunes (Rich- ard Burbage); Jim Carter (Ralph Bashford); Rupert Everett (Christo- pher Marlowe [uncredited]); and others. Awards: Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), Best Writing, Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench), Best Art Direction/Set Direction (Martin Childs and Jill Quertier), Best Costume Design (Sandy Powell), Best Music, Original Musical or Comedy Score (Stephen Warbeck); Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman), Best Single Achievement (Stoppard and Norman, for screenplay), and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy (Paltrow); British Academy Awards for Best Film and Best Editing; and others. Publications Script: Norman, Marc, and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screen- play, New York, 1999. Books: Brode, Douglas, Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love, New York, 2000. Articles: Abramowitz, R., ‘‘Long Cool Woman,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 11, February 1998. Dawtrey, A., and M. Roman, ‘‘‘Love’ Triangle Times 3,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 370, 23/29 March 1998. Hirschberg, Lynn, ‘‘A Dresser for the Ages: In Just One Short Season, Sandy Powell Has Managed to Design Movie Costumes Four Centuries Apart, Each With a Sublime Ratio of Grandeur to Grit,’’ in New York Times, 20 December 1998. Gussow, Mel, ‘‘In Love, With Shakespeare,’’ in New York Times, 12 January 1999. Rothwell, Kenneth S., in Cineaste (New York), vol. 24, no. 2–3, 1999. Elias, Justine, ‘‘Joseph Fiennes,’’ in Interview, vol. 29, no. 2, Febru- ary 1999. Kemp, Philip, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 9, no. 2, Febru- ary 1999. McMahon, Michael, ‘‘A Codpiece and LSD Experience: Influence of Films Such as Shakespeare in Love on the Young,’’ in New Statesman, vol. 128, no. 4422, 5 February 1999. ‘‘Firth and Foremost: Shakespeare In Love’s Colin Firth Relishes a Good Role, His Son, and a Little Road Rage,’’ in People Weekly, vol. 51, no. 5, 8 February 1999. Goodale, Gloria, ‘‘How they Imagined Shakespeare in Love,’’ an interview with Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, in The Christian Science Monitor, vol. 91, no. 68, 5 March 1999. Calhoun, John, ‘‘Tudor City: Production Design of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love,’’ in Interiors, vol. 158, no. 3, March 1999. Sterritt, David, ‘‘A Director in Love with Shakespeare,’’ an interview with John Madden, in The Christian Science Monitor, vol. 91, no. 73, 12 March 1999. Harries, Martin, ‘‘Hollywood in Love: Explaining the Popularity of Shakespeare in Love,’’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 45, no. 32, 16 April 1999. Berthomieu, Pierre, ‘‘Shakespeare in Love: Et je t’appellerai Viola,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 548, April 1999. Kroll, Jack, ‘‘Nothing Like the Dame,’’ in Newsweek, vol. 133, no. 17, 26 April 1999. Marks, Peter, ‘‘Great Literature. Period Costumes. That is So Cool: On the Slick Heels of Shakespeare in Love, Another Entry in a Growing Genre: The Hip Theatrical Period Film,’’ in New York Times, 20 June 1999. Bemrose, John, ‘‘In Love With Shakespeare: His Plays are More Popular Than Ever: To Be or Not to Be a Fan of the Bard is Not in Question,’’ in Maclean’s, 5 July 1999. Caro, Jason, ‘‘1999: The Best and the Worst of a Great Year in Cinema,’’ in Film Review Special (London), no. 30, 1999/2000. *** Around the mid-1990s that staple of British cinema, the period costume drama, began to mutate from its erstwhile Merchant-Ivory- esque good taste into something altogether fiercer, shaggier, and far less well-mannered. The change was signalled by Richard Loncraine’s tour de force Richard III, set in an alternative-history 1930s fascist Britain, and further explored in two realpolitik takes on British monarchs, John Madden’s subversive Mrs. Brown and Shekhar Kapur’s dark, ruthless Elizabeth. At the same time the vogue for adapting and updating British literary classics, sparked by Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (Jane Austen in Beverly Hills), gathered pace with such revisionist exercises as Great Expectations (Dickens in present-day New York), 10 Things I Hate About You (high school Taming of the Shrew) and Baz Luhrmann’s Latino-punk Romeo + Juliet. These two strands came together in Madden’s next film after Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love, in which the Bard himself gets SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1090 Shakespeare in Love pushed off his exalted pedestal and thoroughly dusted down for present-day audiences. Taking advantage of the fact that almost nothing about Shakespeare’s life is known for certain, Madden presents us not with the balding, pensive figure of the Droeshout portrait that adorns the flyleaf of most collected works, but with an ambitious, randy young hack writer struggling to make his way in the precarious world of Elizabethan London. Though the film is a com- edy, the sense of a tough, dangerous era is never played down: the first image we’re confronted with is of the hapless Henslowe, debt-ridden impresario, being tortured by his creditor’s hired thugs. But while it doesn’t gloss over the crueller aspects of the period, the film makes no pretence at consistent historical authenticity—or consistent anything, come to that. Shakespeare in Love is frankly a hodgepodge—or as the Elizabethans might more pungently have put it, a gallimaufry and an ollapodrida, a dish into which any available ingredients might be tossed, the more the merrier. The main plot-line (well-born young woman named Viola dresses up as a boy, joins Shakespeare’s troupe, and has an affair with the playwright) is pinched straight from Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s classic 1941 comic novel No Bed for Bacon. The stagestruck heavy is a blatant lift from Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, and the scene-setting pays homage to the Monty Python school of scatological reconstruc- tion: Henslowe, striding through the London streets, treads in a heap of dung and is narrowly missed by the contents of a pisspot. We get romance, slapstick, bedroom farce, satire, star-crossed tragedy, a ship- wreck, a full-on swashbuckling swordfight, and enough sly literary allusions to sink a concordance. Which is fine since this heterogeneous mixture, a rich but satisfy- ing plum-pudding, works perfectly well on its own terms, absorbing its borrowings and negotiating its switches of mood with little sense of strain. (There’s only one serious lapse, a jarring descent into Carry- On inanity when Will puts on a squeaky voice, holds a veil over his beard and pretends to be Viola’s female cousin.) Besides, style and subject are ideally matched, since we’re dealing with the greatest magpie genius of all time. Shakespeare was notoriously disinclined to devise his own plots, preferring to snaffle them from Plutarch, Holinshed, or whatever dog-eared chapbook came to hand; he cared nothing for unity of mood, tossing dirty jokes into high tragedy in a way that gave the Augustans the vapours; and several of his plays (Richard II, for one) contain whole scenes written by someone else, presumably borrowed when the harassed playwright ran out of time or inspiration. Shakespeare in Love, diverting though it is, hardly attains SHANEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1091 the Bard’s own exalted standard, but it can be claimed as a film after his own heart. Even the jocular anachronisms can quote good Shakespearean precedent; this was the dramatist, after all, who had his Cleopatra propose a game of billiards. The film is lavish with throwaway jokes: Will swigs ale from a mug inscribed ‘‘A Present from Stratford’’ and consults a ‘‘Priest of Psyche’’ over his writer’s block. (‘‘The proud tower of my genius is collapsed,’’ he complains; the Priest, a Freudian avant la lettre, inquires after the state of Will’s other proud tower.) Elsewhere a chatty ferryman boasts ‘‘I ‘ad that Christopher Marlowe in my boat once,’’ and the school of Bardic conspiracy-theorists who insist that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare is spoofed when the elder playwright casually tosses Will the plot for Romeo and Juliet. These and other more literary gags that may bypass the groundlings (a blood- thirsty small boy, given to tormenting mice, proves to be John Webster, future writer of gore-spattered Jacobean dramas) can no doubt be credited to co-screenwriter Tom Stoppard, author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Shakespeare in Love delighted the public, the critics, and the voters of the Academy, who awarded it a string of Oscars. The secret of its appeal, perhaps—along with its gamy exuberance and a peerless display of acting ability from all concerned—is the way it succeeds in being at once frivolous and serious about its subject. The central plot- device—that Romeo and Juliet started out as an absurd piece of fustian entitled Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter—is patently ludicrous, and the film abounds in backstage jokes about the vanities of writers, actors, producers, and so forth. Yet if the process of poetic creativity is sent up, the end result is wholeheartedly celebrated. The final triumphant staging of Shakespeare’s first true masterpiece, while edging dangerously near luvvie-ish self-regard, conveys some- thing of what Nabokov called shamanstvo—the ‘‘enchanter-quality’’ of great theatre. As Henslowe remarks, smiling beatifically as the whole shambles comes magically together, ‘‘It’s a mystery.’’ —Philip Kemp SHANE USA, 1953 Director: George Stevens Production: Paramount Pictures; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 118 minutes. Released 1953. Oscar for Best Cinematography- Color, 1953. Producer: George Stevens; associate producer: Ivan Moffat; screen- play: A. B. Guthrie, Jr. with additional dialogue by Jack Sher, from the novel by Jack Schaefer; photography: Loyal Griggs; editors: William Hornbeck and Tom McAdoo; sound recordists: Harry Lindgran and Gene Garwin; art directors: Hal Pereira and Walter Tyler; music score: Victor Young; special effects: Gordon Jennings; costume designer: Edith Head; technical adviser: Joe DeYong. Cast: Alan Ladd (Shane); Jean Arthur (Marion Starrett); Van Heflin (Joe Starrett); Brandon de Wilde (Joey); Jack Palance (Wilson); Ben Johnson (Chris); Edgar Buchanan (Lewis); Emile Meyer (Ryker); Elisha Cook Jr. (Torrey); Douglas Spencer (Shipstead); John Dierkes (Morgan); Ellen Corby (Mrs. Torrey); Paul McVey (Grafton); John Miller (Atkey); Edith Evanson (Mrs. Shipstead); Leonard Strong (Wright); Ray Spiker (Johnson); Janice Carroll (Susan Lewis); Martin Mason (Howell); Helen Brown (Mrs. Lewis); Nancy Kulp (Mrs. Howell); Howard J. Negley (Pete); Beverly Washburn (Ruth Lewis); George Lewis (Ryker man); Charles Quirk (Clerk); Jack Sterling, Henry Wills, Rex Moore, and Ewing Brown (Ryker men). Publications Books: Fenin, George N., and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to Cinerama, New York, 1962. Babcock, David, The Hero, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1968. Everson, William K., A Pictoral History of the Western Film, New York, 1969. Richie, Donald, George Stevens: An American Romantic, New York, 1970, 1985. Bazin, Andre, What Is Cinema? 2, edited by Hugh Gray, Berke- ley, 1971. Cawelti, John, The Six-Gun Mystique, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971. Fenin, George N., and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the 70s, New York, 1973. French, Philip, Westerns—Aspects of a Movie Genre, New York, 1973. Phillips, Gene D., The Movie Makers: Artists in the Industry, Chi- cago, 1973. Nachbar, Jack, editor, Focus on the Western, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974. Parish, James, and Michael Pitts, The Great Western Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Henry, Marilyn, and Ron De Sourdis, The Films of Alan Ladd, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1981. Petri, Bruce, A Theory of American Film: The Films and Techniques of George Stevens, New York, 1987. Articles: Stern, Nina, in Films in Review (New York), April 1953. Luft, H. G., ‘‘George Stevens,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1953. Time (New York), 13 April 1953. Martin, B., in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 8 August 1953. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Shane and George Stevens,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Fall 1953. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘George Stevens and the American Dream,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 11, 1957. Stang, Joanne, ‘‘Hollywood Romantic—A Monograph of George Stevens,’’ in Films and Filming (New York), July 1959. Warshow, Robert, ‘‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,’’ in The Imme- diate Experience, New York, 1962. Roman, Robert C., ‘‘Alan Ladd,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1964. SHANE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1092 Shane ‘‘Viewing Report of Shane,” in Screen Education (London), Septem- ber-October 1964. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘George Stevens—His Work,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1965 and May 1965. Silke, James R., in Cinema (Beverly Hills), December-January 1965, Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Return of Shane,’’ in Films and Filming (London), May 1966. Vermilye, Jerry, ‘‘Jean Arthur,’’ in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1966. ‘‘Stevens Issue’’ of Dialogue on Film (Washington, D.C.), no. 1, 1972. Albright Jr., Charles, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Miller, G., ‘‘Shane Redux: The Shootist and the Western Dilemma,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Summer 1983. Desser, D., ‘‘Kurosawa’s Easternd ‘Western’,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Fall 1983. Dominicus, M., and S. Daney, in Skrien (Amsterdam), November- December 1985. Zizek, S., ‘‘Looking Awry,’’ in October (Cambridge, Massachu- setts), Fall 1989. Ronald, A., ‘‘Shane’s Pale Ghost,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 3, 1990. Holtsmark, E. B., ‘‘The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema,’’ in Bucknell Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1991. Reid’s Film Index, no. 12, 1993. Norman, Barry, in Radio Times (London), vol. 279, no. 3648, 4 December 1993. Berthomieu, Pierre, ‘‘L’homme des vallées perdues: Le passage du cavalier,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 397, March 1994. Flora, J. M., ‘‘Shane (Novel and Film) at Century’s End,’’ in Journal of American Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 1996. Cieutat, M., ‘‘‘L’homme des vallees perdues’ ou le western retrouve,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau), vol. 86, no. 1, 1998. Nichols, Peter M., ‘‘Restoring What Time, and Editors, Took Away: Renovated Film Classics Find Their Way Back Onto Big Screens and Video, Often In Version Never Seen Before,’’ in The New York Times, vol. 147, section 2, AR28, 17 May 1998. *** Narrative films can be generally categorized into those that are motivated by plot and those that are motivated by character. Many SHE DONE HIM WRONGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1093 American films are often cited as belonging to the former category, particularly in comparison to some of the European films. Shane is pure plot and pure American. The characters, rather than autonomous individuals, are functions of the plot and move through their respec- tive roles with the assurance of legend. They possess no depth or dimension beyond the surface; they are always and exactly what they seem to be. And, ironically, this is their strength and the strength of the film. The plot of Shane is a masterpiece of simplicity. The Indian Wars have been fought and won. The homesteaders have settled in to farm the land, threatening the open range of the ranchers. The law is a three-day ride from the community, and the tenuous co-existence waits for eruption into ‘‘gunsmoke.’’ The ranchers, led by the Ryker brothers, try to intimidate the homesteaders in an effort to force them out of the valley, but the homesteaders are held together by the determination of a single man, Joe Starrett, who wants to build a life on the land for his wife Marion and young son Joey. Into this tension rides Shane, a stranger who is befriended by the Starretts. A gun- fighter by profession, Shane tries to renounce his former trade and join the community of homesteaders. As the tension increases, another gunfighter is recruited to bait and kill the helpless homestead- ers. When Starrett is left with no alternative but to meet the hired gunfighter, it is obvious that only Shane is a match for the final shootout. He overpowers Starrett and rides into town where he kills the gunman and the Rykers. Now that the valley is safe, Shane bids farewell to Joey and rides off into the distant mountains. Of all American genres, the Western is arguably the most durable. The Western has tended to document not the history of the West but those cultural values that have become cherished foundations of our national identity. The Western certifies our ideals of individualism, initiative, independence, persistence and dignity. It also displays some of our less admirable traits of lawlessness, violence and racism. Possibly more than any previous American film, Shane tries to encapsulate the cultural ethos of the Western. Rather than avoiding the clichés, platitudes and stereotypes of the genre, Shane pursues and embraces them. With the exception of a saloon girl and an Indian attack, all of the ingredients of the typical Western are present: the wide open spaces, the ranchers feuding with the farmers, the homesteading family trying to build a life, the rival gunman, the absence of law, the survival of the fastest gun, even the mandatory shoulder wound. Embodying as it does the look and feel of the Western, Shane becomes an essential rarity; it not only preserves but honors our belief in our heritage. As myth, it is appropriate that Shane is seen through the eyes of a small boy. Joey is the first to see Shane ride into the community, more than the others he perceives the inner strength of the man, and he’s the only one to bid Shane farewell as he leaves the valley. As both the child’s idolization of an adult and the creative treatment of a myth, Shane is not a story of the West; it is, rather, the West as we believe it to have been. Everything in the film favors its treatment of the myth. Alan Ladd—with his golden hair, his soft voice, his modest manner—is more the Olympian god than the rugged frontiersman or the outcast gunfighter. He rides down from the distant mountains and into lives of a settlement in need of his special talents. A stranger who doesn’t belong and can never be accepted, he is a man without a past and without a future. He exists only for the moment of confrontation; and once that moment has passed, he has no place in the community. Even the way in which his movements are choreographed and photo- graphed seem mythic—when riding into town for the final shootout, for example, the low angle tracking of the camera, the gait of his horse, the pulsing of the music with its heroic, lonely tones and the vast, panoramic landscapes all contribute to the classical dimensions of the film. Shane is the generic loner who belongs to no one and no place. He possesses capability, integrity, restraint; yet there is a sense of despair and tragedy about him. Shane is that most characteristic of American anachronisms, the man who exists on the fringe of an advancing civilization. His background and profession place him on the periph- ery of law and society. The same skills as a warrior that make him essential to the survival of the community also make him suspect and even dangerous to that same community. In the tradition of William S. Hart, Tom Mix, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, Shane is the embodiment of the Western hero. Shane is a reluctant mediator. There is a moral guilt about his profession that he carries with him as clearly as his buckskins. He wants to lay aside the violence of his past, but like the Greek heroes, of which he is kin, fate will not allow him to alter what is destined for him. Although he conspicuously tries to avoid the kind of confronta- tions he is best prepared to face, he suffers humiliation in doing so which is mistaken for cowardice. Once again he must prove himself, as if serving as the defender of those weaker will atone for his past and his profession. Consequently, a paradox emerges; he is both neces- sary and a threat to the survival of the community. In the Starrett family, for example, he begins to be more important to Joey than his father and more attractive to Marion than her husband. If the commu- nity is to grow and prosper, it must do so without him. Once he has served his function, he has no place and must again move on. Shane is a tapestry laced with contrasts. The gun and the ax, the horse and the land, the buckskins and the denims, the loner and the family. In the end, the ax (peace) replaces the gun (violence), the land (stability) replaces the horse (transience), the denims (work) replace the buckskins (wilderness), the family (future) replaces the loner (past). The unheralded mythic god leaves and the community is safe. Good has triumphed over evil, the family has been preserved, all the guns have been silenced. And yet there is a sense of loss. We have admired and appreciated Shane, but he exists for a single purpose and a single moment. When he has departed, we know we’re safer and better for his presence; but we also know that we are again vulnerable. —Stephen E. Bowles SHE DONE HIM WRONG USA, 1933 Director: Lowell Sherman Production: Paramount Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 65 minutes. Released 1933. Filmed in Paramount studios. Producer: William LeBaron; screenplay: Mae West with Harvey Thew and John Bright (some sources do not list West with script SHE DONE HIM WRONG FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1094 She Done Him Wrong credit), from the play Diamond Lil by Mae West; photography: Charles Lang; music and lyrics: Ralph Rainger. Cast: Mae West (Lady Lou); Cary Grant (Captain Cummings); Gilbert Roland (Serge Stanieff); Noah Beery, Sr. (Gus Jordan); Rafaela Ottiano (Russian Rita); David Landau (Dan Flynn); Rochelle Hudson (Sally); Owen Moore (Chick Clark); Fuzzy Knight (Rag- Time Kelly); Tammany Young (Chuck Connors); Dewey Robinson (Spider Kane); Grace La Rue (Frances). Publications Books: Baxter, John, Hollywood in the Thirties, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1968. West, Mae, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, New York, 1970. Deschner, Donald, The Films of Cary Grant, New York, 1971. Moley, Raymond, The Hays Office, New York, 1971. Mellen, Joan, Women and Sexuality in the New Film, New York, 1973. Tuska, Jon, The Films of Mae West, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973. Vermilye, Jerry, Cary Grant, New York, 1973. Cashin, Fergus, Mae West: A Biography, London, 1981. Eells, George, and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West, New York, 1982. Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1983. Schickel, Richard, Cary Grant: A Celebration, London, 1983. Chandler, Charlotte, The Ultimate Seduction, New York, 1984. Dupuis, Jean-Jacques, Cary Grant, Paris, 1984. Ashman, Chuck, and Pamela Trescott, Cary Grant, London, 1986. Higham, Charles, and Ray Moseley, Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, New York, 1989. Buehrer, Beverley Bare, Cary Grant: A Bio-Bibliography, New York, 1990. Wansell, Geoffrey, Haunted Idol: The Story of the Real Cary Grant, New York, 1992. Hamilton, Marybeth, When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, Berkeley, 1995, 1997. McCann, Graham, Cary Grant: A Class Apart, New York, 1996. Wansell, Geoffrey, Cary Grant: Dark Angel, New York, 1996. SHERLOCK, JR.FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1095 Articles: New York Times, 10 February 1933. Variety (New York), 14 February 1933. New Yorker, 18 February 1933. ‘‘Mae West’’ in Vanity Fair (New York), March 1933. Troy, William, ‘‘Mae West and the Classic Tradition,’’ in Nation (New York), 8 November 1933. Roman, Robert, ‘‘Cary Grant,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1961. Bowser, Eileen, and Richard Griffith, in Film Notes, edited by Eileen Bowser, New York, 1969. Braun, Eric, ‘‘Doing What Comes Naturally,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October and November 1970. Raines, Elaine, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Deffaa, Chip, in Entertainment Weekly, no. 183, 13 August 1993. *** Given the variety and richness of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s—the decades now called the classical period of American film—it is difficult to claim that any stretch of time belonged to any star, director, or studio. Still, it is tempting to proclaim the years from 1932 to 1934 as the age of Mae West. From her movie debut in Night after Night (in a small part: the studios were not sure how the movie public would take to the woman whose contempt for all proprieties and censors was so manifest), Mae West asserted her force as a screen presence. However, it was not until her second film, She Done Him Wrong, that the audience could appreciate the range of West’s appeal. Based on one of West’s most celebrated stage vehicles, Diamond Lil, the film showed us a woman of uncanny sensitivity to verbal sex-play (she was responsible for transcribing the lines she wrote for herself in Diamond Lil to the screen); a woman whose self-assurance was matched only by her capacity for self-caricature; a woman who would give ground to no mere male; a woman who calmly overturned all the principles of what we now call sexism; and a woman with a voice like none other heard in the movies. There is no overestimating the last of these characteristics. With the death of silent film, individuality of vocal inflection assumed paramount importance; with the demise specifically of silent comedy, the human voice substituted for some of the comic uniqueness implicit in the bodies of Chaplin, Keaton and the others. (Signifi- cantly, when Chaplin at last gave in to speaking on the screen, a new visual presence had to be devised.) The stage, radio and vaudeville comedians, for a while at least, could provide what was needed, but no one with more dazzling public success than Mae West. There could be no separation of her dialogue from her voice. Her popularity was for a time so enormous that the movie censors waited to put her in her place, or rather the place the censors thought she ought to occupy. Eventually the censors had their way: with the advent of the Breen Office in 1934, Mae West was fated to become a rather bowdlerized memory of the star of She Done him Wrong and I’m No Angel. The woman was indomitable; she continued making films through the 1930s and early 1940s. In the final years of her life, she made atrocities such as Myra Breckinridge and Sextette. Even in the later 1930s, however, few of the pleasures of She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel were to be duplicated. Aside from West herself, She Done Him Wrong is notable for West’s ‘‘discovery’’ of Cary Grant (he had actually appeared in several earlier movies). Grant manages to make himself noticed despite his relative inexperience, despite his function as a foil for Mae West, and despite the fact that he has to impersonate a policeman impersonating a Salvation Army officer. And in the course of its preposterous little plot, involving such unlikely comic topics as white slavery, the film somehow manages to come up with a villainess called ‘‘Russian Rita.’’ The real lure is, of course, Mae West, the woman who could make America howl by introducing herself as one of the finest women who ever walked the streets. —Elliot Rubenstein SHERLOCK, JR. USA, 1924 Director: Buster Keaton Production: Metro Pictures and Buster Keaton Productions; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 45 minutes. Released April 1924. Producer: Joseph M. Schenck; scenario: Clyde Bruckman, Jean Haves, and Joseph Mitchell; photography: Elgin Lessley and Bryon Houck; editor: Buster Keaton; art director: Fred Gabourie; cos- tumes: Clare West. Cast: Buster Keaton (The Projectionist); Kathryn McGuire (The Girl); Ward Crane (The Rival); Joseph Keaton (The Father). Publications Books: Keaton, Buster, with Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, New York, 1960. Pantieri, José, L’originalissimo Buster Keaton, Milan, 1963. Turconi, Davide, and Francesco Savio, Buster Keaton, Venice, 1963. Oms, Marcel, Buster Keaton, Lyons, 1964. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, Keaton et compagnie: Les Burlesques américaines du ‘‘muet,” Paris, 1964. Blesh, Rudi, Keaton, New York, 1966. Lebel, Jean-Pierre, Buster Keaton, New York, 1967. McCaffrey, Donald, Great Comedians, New York, 1968. SHERLOCK, JR. FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1096 Sherlock, Jr. Robinson, David, Buster Keaton, London, 1968. Anthologie du cinéma 7, Paris, 1971. Mast, Gerald, The Comic Mind, New York, 1973; revised edition, Chicago, 1979. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, Buster Keaton, Paris, 1973; revised edi- tion, 1986. Kerr, Walter, The Silent Clowns, New York, 1975. Anobile, Richard, editor, The Best of Buster, New York, 1976. Wead, George, Buster Keaton and the Dynamics of Visual Wit, New York, 1976. Moews, Daniel, Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up, Berke- ley, 1977. Wead, George, and George Ellis, The Film Career of Buster Keaton, Boston, 1977. Dardis, Tom, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down, New York, 1979. Benayoun, Robert, The Look of Buster Keaton, Paris, 1982; Lon- don, 1984. Eberwein, Robert T., Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting, Princeton, 1984. Kline, Jim, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton, Secaucus, 1993. Brunovska Karnick, Kristine, and Henry Jenkins, editors, Classical Hollywood Comedy, New York, 1995. Mead, Marion, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, New York, 1995. Oldham, Gabriella, Keaton’s Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter, Carbondale, 1996. Knopf, Robert, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton, Prince- ton, 1999. Bengtson, John, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood through the Films of Buster Keaton, Santa Monica, 2000. Articles: New York Times, 26 May 1924. Variety (New York), 28 May 1924. Life (New York), 19 June 1924. Agee, James, ‘‘Comedy’s Greatest Era,’’ in Agee on Film, New York, 1958. ‘‘Keaton Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August 1958. Bishop, Christopher, ‘‘The Great Stone Face,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1958. SHICHININ NO SAMURAIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1097 Baxter, Brian, ‘‘Buster Keaton,’’ in Film (London), November- December 1958. Leuwen, Jean-Marc, ‘‘Buster Keaton,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), August- September 1960. Blue, James, and John Gillett, ‘‘Keaton at Venice,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1965–66. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Le Génie de Buster Keaton,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 10 February 1966. Benayoun, Robert, ‘‘Le Regard de Buster Keaton,’’ in Positif (Paris), Summer 1966. Villelaur, Anne, ‘‘Buster Keaton,’’ in Dossiers du Cinéma: Cinéastes 1 (Paris), 1971. Lindberg, I., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), March 1973. Pasquier, Sylvain de, ‘‘Buster Keaton’s Gags,’’ in Journal of Modern Literature (Philadelphia), April 1973. Pratt, George, ‘‘Anything Can Happen—And Generally Did! Buster Keaton on His Silent Film Career,’’ in Image (Rochester), Decem- ber 1974. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Sherlock Junior: Le Forcené de l’intelligence,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), October 1975. Sauvaget, D., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. Eberwein, Robert T., ‘‘The Filmic Dream and Point of View,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1980. Valot, J., ‘‘Discours sur le cinéma dans quelques films de Buster Keaton,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), February 1980. Magill’s Survey of Cinema: Silent Films, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982. ‘‘Buster Keaton,’’ in Film Dope (London), March 1984. Cazals, Thierry, ‘‘Un Monde à la démesure de l’homme,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1987. Sweeney, K. W., ‘‘The Dream of Disruption: Melodrama and Gag Structure in Keaton’s Sherlock Junior,’’ in Wide Angle (Balti- more), no. 1, 1991. Pernod, P., ‘‘L’odyssée des espaces Keatoniens,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1991. Télérama (Paris), no. 2374, 12 July 1995. D’Elia, Joseph, ‘‘Sherlock, Jr. / Our Hospitality,’’ in Library Journal, vol. 121, no. 13, August 1996. Rommetveit, I., ‘‘Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.,’’ in Z Filmtidsskrift (Oslo), vol. 1, no. 55, 1996. *** Although he had been popular with critics and the public for several years, Buster Keaton became a major star with The Navigator, released after Sherlock, Jr. Nevertheless, Sherlock, Jr. is a master- piece. It contains a story within a story, through which Keaton deals with opposition central to Western culture: dream versus reality, and reality versus art. The film starts routinely. Beginning the dream/reality opposition, we learn that Keaton yearns to be a detective, but works merely as a projectionist. The action of the story is instigated by the announce- ment of a missing object. The watch belonging to the father of Keaton’s girlfriend has been stolen, and as Keaton is the prime suspect, the father expels him from the house. Developing a narrative around the absence (the watch) and an expulsion of the hero is much like nineteenth-century melodrama. Even in comedies, though, this structure is not extraordinary. After Keaton’s expulsion, the film takes on a less traditional structure. Keaton falls asleep on the job. In a dream, he looks out the projectionist’s window, and sees his girlfriend, her father, and his rival as performers in a film. Though the dream mirrors ‘‘real life,’’ there are some significant changes. The setting is aristocratic, and instead of a watch, a necklace is missing. The biggest change is with Keaton himself. Awake he is only an aspiring investigator with little Holmesian ability, but once he enters the story of the film within the film, he becomes a master detective. After the dream begins, Sherlock, Jr. takes on characteristics of an avant-garde film. The projectionist walks to the screen, and tries to become part of the film. Like a film spectator suspending disbelief, Keaton is fooled by the realistic effect of the cinema, so much so that he cannot separate life from the movies. However, unlike the ordinary spectator, Keaton is able to participate in the film he watches. This, however, has its hazards. As he is about to enter a house, the scene cuts to an African veldt where Keaton confronts a lion. Another cut places Keaton in a snowbank; with another he is transported to the ocean. Upon entering the film within the film, the projectionist believed he would be taking part in a narrative as neat and linear as his real life one. Instead, he is at the mercy of the most artificial of cinematic devices, the cut, which allows for instant changes of locale, or the ellision of large chunks of time. A normal story eventually returns, and Keaton (the detective) solves the mystery. A normal visual style returns, too. During the quick-cutting sequence, the movie screen, the curtain around it, and the theater audience were visible in the frame. Once the detective story begins, however, the camera moves in, no longer showing any of the theater or the edges around the screen. The film within the film (Keaton’s dream) comes to look just like the character’s ‘‘real life’’ (the beginning, when Keaton works as a projectionist). Thus, art seems to imitate life. When Keaton awakes, his girlfriend visits him in the projection- ist’s booth, and tells him he has been absolved of all guilt in the watch theft. Keaton looks at the film he has been showing, and sees a man and woman reconciling. He watches for instructions, doing every- thing the man does, kissing his girlfriend only after the man and woman have kissed on the screen. Here, in a final blurring of the two, life imitates art. —Eric Smoodin SHICHININ NO SAMURAI (The Seven Samurai) Japan, 1954 Director: Akira Kurosawa Production: Toho Productions (Tokyo); black and white, 35mm; running time: original version: 203 minutes, international version: SHICHININ NO SAMURAI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1098 Shichinin no samurai 160 minutes (no copies of longer print extant); length: original version: 5,480 meters, international version: 4,401 meters. Released 26 April 1954, Tokyo. Re-released 1982. Producer: Shojiro Motoki; screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, and Akira Kurosawa; photography: Asakasu Nakai; sound engineer: Fumio Yanoguchi; art director: So Matsuyama; music: Famio Hayasaka; coordinator of wrestling and sword stunts: Yoshio Sugino; archery masters: Ienori Kaneko and Shigeru Endo. Cast: The Samurai: Takashi Shimura (Kambei, the leader); Toshiro Mifune (Kikuchiyo); Yoshio Inaba (Gorobei); Seiji Miyaguchi (Kyuzo); Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi); Daisuke Kato (Shichiroji); Isao (Ko) Kimura (Katsuchiro); The Peasants: Kuninori Kodo (Gisaku, the old man); Kamatari Fujiwara (Manzo); Yoshio Tsuchiya (Rikichi); Bokusen Hidari (Yohei); Yoshio Kosugi (Mosuke); Keiji Sakakida (Gosaku); Jiro Kumagai, Haruko Toyama, Tsuneo Katagiri, and Yasuhisa Tsutsumi (Peasants and farmers); Keiko Tsushima (Shino, son of Manzo); Toranosuke Ogawa (Grandfather); Noriko Sengoku (Wife from burned house); Yu Akitsu (Husband from burned house); Gen Shimizu (Small master); Jun Tasaki and Isao Yamagata (Other samurais); Jun Tatari (Laborer); Atsushi Watanabe (Guardian of the stable); Yukiko Shimazaki (Rikichi’s woman); Sojin Kamiyama (Singer); Eijiro Igashino (Bandit chief). Award: Venice Film Festival, Silver Prize, 1954. Publications Script: Kurosawa, Akira, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni, The Seven Samurai, New York, 1970. Books: Anderson, Joseph, and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Rutland, Vermont, 1960; revised edition, Princeton, 1982. Ezratti, Sacha, Kurosawa, Paris, 1964. SHICHININ NO SAMURAIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1099 Sato, Tadao, Kurosawa Akira no Sekai (The World of Akira Kurosawa), Tokyo, 1968. Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Berkeley, 1970; revised edition, 1996. Richie, Donald, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Charac- ter, New York, 1971. Mesnil, Michel, Kurosawa, Paris, 1973. Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, New York, 1976. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Erens, Patricia, Akira Kurosawa: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bunuel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Kurosawa, Akira, Something Like an Autobiography, New York, 1982. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Desser, David, The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1983. Tassone, Aldo, Akira Kurosawa, Paris, 1983. Chang, Kevin K.W., editor, Kurosawa: Perceptions on Life: An Anthology of Essays, Honolulu, 1991. Prince, Stephen, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton, 1991; revised and expanded edition, 1999. Goodwin, James, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, Balti- more, 1994. Goodwin, James, editor, Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, New York, 1994. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cin- ema, Durham, 2000. Articles: Leyda, Jay, ‘‘The Films of Kurosawa,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Fall 1954. Richard, Tony, in Sight and Sound (London) Spring 1955. Barnes, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), April 1955. Leyda, Jay, in Film Culture (New York), no. 4, 1956. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 20 November 1956. Hines, T. S., in Films in Review (New York), December 1956. Knight, Arthur, in Saturday Review (New York), 1 December 1956. McCarten, John, in New Yorker, 1 December 1956. Hartung, Philip T., in Commonweal (New York), 14 December 1956. Life (New York), 14 January 1957. Gaffary, F., in Positif (Paris), March 1957. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Samurai and Small Beer,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1961. Anderson, Joseph, ‘‘When the Twain Meet: Hollywood’s Remake of Seven Samurai,” in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1962. Iwasaki, Akira, ‘‘Kurosawa and His Work,’’ in Japan Quarterly (Tokyo), 1965. ‘‘Les Sept Samourais Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), April 1971. Kaminsky, Stuart, ‘‘The Samurai Film and the Western,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, DC), Fall 1972. Tucker, Richard, ‘‘Kurosawa and Ichikawa: Feudalist and Individual- ist,’’ in Japan, Film Image, London, 1973. Silver, Alain, in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1975. Nolley, K., ‘‘The Western as Jidai-geki,’’ in Western American Literature (Logan, Utah), no. 3, 1976. Kaplan, F., in Cineaste (New York), no. 1, 1979–80. Hosman, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), August 1980. Carbonnier, A., in Cinéma (Paris), February 1981. Ramasse, F., in Positif (Paris), February 1981. Cardullo, B., ‘‘The Circumstance of the East, the Fate of the West: Notes, Mostly on the Seven Samurai,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1985. Tucker, G. M., in Soundtrack (Los Angeles), June 1985. Amengual, Barthélemy, in Positif (Paris), October 1985. Parshall, P. F., ‘‘East Meets West: Casablanca vs. The Seven Samu- rai,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1989. Moskowitz, G., ‘‘Action Movie with Art,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 349, 9 November 1992. Crowdus, Gary, ‘‘Seven Samurai,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 19, no. 4, 1993. Lord, S., in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 113/114, 1998. ‘‘Toshiro Mifune,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 369, no. 8, 5 Janu- ary 1998. Hogue, Peter, ‘‘The Kurosawa Story,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 35, no. 1, January 1999. *** From its opening shot of silhouetted horsemen galloping across a horizon line, The Seven Samurai announces its sources. The setting may be a 16th-century Japan convulsed by civil war, but those wide- open, lawless spaces are immediately recognizable as those of the Hollywood West. Kurosawa has made no secret of his debt to the Western in general and John Ford in particular: the small farming village of The Seven Samurai, nestled between mountain and plain, might be the Tomb- stone of My Darling Clementine. The marauding brigands who wait in the woods could be the vicious Clantons of Ford’s film, and the seven samurai hired by the villagers for their defense could be the band of deputies, saloon girls, and alcoholic hangers-on assembled by Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp. There is, no doubt, a broad and general resemblance between the American Western and the Japanese samu- rai film—in terms of the themes both genres treat, and in the historical setting they choose for their work—but in The Seven Samurai the correspondences are strict and specific. We recognize the rules of the game that Kurosawa is playing in The Seven Samurai, where in a more arcanely Japanese samurai film such as Hideo Gosha’s Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron, we do not. Like Ford in his Westerns, Kurosawa organizes the action of The Seven Samurai around three different elements: the civilized (the villagers), the savage (the brigands), and those who live in between (Ford’s soldiers and lawmen, Kurosawa’s samurai), defending civili- zation by savage, violent means. (This three-point, triangular struc- ture is something personal to Kurosawa; it pops up in different contexts throughout his work, most decisively in Kagemusha.) By placing his samurai in the same mediating position as Ford’s lawmen, Kurosawa is self-consciously breaking with the traditions of the SHICHININ NO SAMURAI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1100 genre, in which the samurai represent civilization at its most refined, entrenched, and aristocratic. The heroes of Kurosawa’s films are masterless samurai, no longer attached to a royal house (and hence no longer entitled to be called samurai—masterless samurai are called ronin). Both Ford’s lawmen and Kurosawa’s samurai are profoundly marginal figures, prevented from fully entering society by the posses- sion of the same skills they must employ upholding it. But where Ford in his middle-period films searches constantly for the ways to reintegrate the lawmen in to society (before resolving, in his late work, that such a reconciliation is impossible), Kurosawa in The Seven Samurai emphasizes the unbridgeable differences between the villagers and their hired defenders. Though the townspeople and the samurai can fight in temporary alliance, they can never fight for the same goals: the villagers fight for home and family, the samurai for professional honor. The only society allowed to the samurai is their own; if civilization has no place for them, they must make a place of their own. The formation of the samurai’s separate, self-enclosed society—the professional group—is the subject of some of the finest passages in Kurosawa’s film: once a suitable father has been found, in the form of the veteran warrior Kambei, the other members of the family fall into place, down to a wifely companion for Kambei (Shichiroji, an old comrade-in-arms), a dutiful son (the apprentice Katsushiro), and a black sheep (Kikuchiyo). The remaining samurai are distributed like the Three Graces—Wisdom (Gorobei), Skill (Kyuzo), and Hope (Heihachi). As schematic as this arrangement may sound, Kurosawa never lets it solidify; there is no flat sense of allegory here, but rather an open vision of different talents and attributes brought into harmony. To distinguish between the members of the group, Kurosawa gives each a defining gesture, much as Walt Disney differentiated his seven dwarfs: Kambei’s reflective rubbing of his scalp, Kikuchiyo’s leaps and whoops, Katsushiro’s imploring eyes, etc. This, too, is classic Hollywood shorthand technique, in which a ritual gesture completely subsumes a character’s psychology. And there is a pleasure in its repetition: each time Kambei scratches his head, he is reassuring the strength and constancy of his character. The gesture never changes, and neither does he. He is permanent, and in this one movement we know him and trust him. At least one-quarter of The Seven Samurai is devoted to the relations between the townspeople and the professional group. Kurosawa seems to be looking for a stable, workable relationship, but he rejects each possibility in turn; there is always a dissonance, a contradiction, between the two groups. The samurai take charge of fortifying the village and training the farmers to fight, yet because they are, in the end, mere employees of the villagers, they are never in a position of genuine authority. The samurai tell themselves that they are fighting on behalf of the poor and helpless, but the cozy paternal- ism of this relationship is undermined by the suggestion that the farmers have been holding out—that they have secret reserves of rice and sake they refuse to share with their protectors. Two of the samurai have ties to the villagers—Katsushiro, who falls in love with a village girl, and Kikuchiyo, who is revealed to be a farmer’s son—yet neither of these bonds is allowed to endure. By insisting so strongly on the absolute separation of the groups, Kurosawa departs radically from the Western archetype: the lawmen can no longer derive their values from the community, as they did in Ford and Hawks, but must now define those values for themselves. This sense of moral isolation— fresh and startling in the genre context of 1954—eventually became Kurosawa’s gift to the American Western, his way of giving back as much as he took. Even before The Seven Samurai was officially remade as a Western (John Sturges’s 1960 The Magnificent Seven), Kurosawa’s variation had been incorporated in the genre, giving rise to the series of ‘‘professional’’ Westerns that runs from Hawks’s optimistic Rio Bravo to the final cynicism of Sergio Leone. Separation is also the subject of Kurosawa’s mise-en-scène. Using both foregound-background separation of deep-focus shots and the flattening, abstracting effect of telephoto lenses, Kurosawa puts a sense of unbridgeable space in nearly all of his shots. Even in what should be the most intimate and open scenes among the samurai themselves, Kurosawa arranges his compositions in distinct rigid planes, placing one or two figures in the extreme foreground, two or three more in a row in the middle, the balances lined up in the background (this will also be the design applied to the burial mound at the film’s conclusion). The primary visual motif is one of boundaries: the natural ones formed around the village by the mountains, woods, and flooded rice fields, the manmade boundaries of fences, stockades, and doorways. The extreme formality of Kurosawa’s compositions also emphasizes the boundaries of the frame; there is only occasion- ally a sense of off-screen space, as if nothing existed beyond the limits of the camera’s eye. The world of The Seven Samurai is carefully delineated, compartmentalized; not only are the characters isolated in their separate groups, but in separate spaces. The compartmentalization reflects Kurosawa’s theme, but it also works (more originally, I think) in organizing the film emotionally— in building its suspense and narrative power. Three hours pass between the announcement of the brigands’ attack and its arrival—an impossibly long time to keep the audience waiting for a single event. But where most filmmakers would try to fill the interval with minor flurries of action, Kurosawa gives us only two: Kambei’s rescue of a child and the guerilla foray into the brigands’ camp. These incidents are so widely spaced (misplaced, even, in terms of conventional rhythm) that they don’t serve at all to support the structure of crest and valley, crest and valley that the long form usually depends on. Instead, Kurosawa sticks to a strict linearity: the narrative has been divided (compartmentalized?) into discrete acts (the posing of the threat, the recruitment of the samurai, the fortification of the village, the battle), separated not by strongly marked climaxes but by the slow and subtle transitions. The rigorous chopping, dividing, and underlining of space is the only constant factor through these transitions: no matter what the characters may be doing, the visual style is bearing down on them, forcing them further into immobility, isolation, entrapment. The suspense builds visually, subliminally, until we long for the final battle with its promise of release. The battle in the rain is the most celebrated passage in Kurosawa’s work, justly famous for its overwhelming physicality—the sense of force and texture, of sensual immersion, produced by staging the sequence in the mud and confusion of a fierce storm. But the rain also accomplishes something else—it fills in the spaces that Kurosawa has so carefully carved off, creating a continuity, an even density, from foreground to background. The rain begins the night before the battle, during the greatest moment of divisiveness between the townspeople and the samurai—the confrontation over Kikuchiyo’s right to love a village girl. By forcing the two groups to fight more closely together, the rain closes this gap during the battle. And suddenly, all other boundaries are broken open: as part of their strategy, the SHOAHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1101 samurai allow some of the brigands to cross the fortifications (cut off from support, they can be killed more easily in the village square) and the camera loses its fixity and formality, panning wildly to follow details of action within the struggle. It is an ineffable moment of freedom, and of course it cannot last. For his epilogue, Kurosawa returns to divided space. The surviv- ing samurai are seen in one shot, standing still before the graves of those who fell; the villagers are seen in another, singing and moving in unison as they plant the new rice crop. There probably isn’t a more plangent moment in all Kurosawa’s work than this juxtaposition of two different tempos, two different worlds. They are separated only by a cut, but they are separated forever. —Dave Kehr SHOAH France, 1985 Director: Claude Lanzmann Production: Les Films Aleph-Historia Films, with assistance from the Ministry of Culture; Fuji-color; in two parts; running time, part 1: 274 minutes, part 2: 292 minutes; length, part 1: 24,660 feet, part 2: 26,280 feet. Released May 1985. Production administrator: Raymonde Bade-Mauffroy; production managers: Stella Gregorz-Quef, Severine Olivier-Lacamp; photog- raphy: Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, William Lubchansky; assistant photographers: Caroline Champetier de Ribes, Jean-Yves Escoffier, Slavek Olczyk, Andres Silvart; editors: Ziva Postec, Anna Ruiz; sound editors: Danielle Fillios, Ann-Marie L’Hote, Sabine Mamou; sound recordists: Bernard Aubouy, Michel Vionnet; sound re-recordist: Bernard Aubouy; research assistants: Corinna Coulmas, Irene Steinfeldt-Levi, Shalmi Bar Mor; interpreters: Barbara Janica, Francine Kaufman, Mrs. Apfelbaum; subtitles: A. Whitelaw, W. Byron. Award: Recipient of the Robert Flaherty Documentary Award, BAFTA, 1986. Publications Books: Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, New York, 1985. David, Jonathan, Riva Krut, and Jeremy Schonfield, editors, Film History, and the Jewish Experience: A Reader, London, 1986. Cuau, Bernard, Au sujet de Shoah: le film de Claude Lanzmann, Paris, 1990. Hazan, Barbara, Shoah: le film, Paris, 1990. Forges, Jean-Fran?ois, Eduquer contre Auschwitz, Paris, 1997. Articles: Variety (New York), 15 May 1985. Osmalin, P., in Cinéma (Paris), June 1985. Chevrie, M., and Hervé Le Roux, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1985. Kieffer, A., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1985. Marienstras, E., in Positif (Paris), July-August 1985. Ophuls, Marcel, ‘‘Closely Watched Trains,’’ in American Film (Washington, DC), November 1985. Film (Frankfurt), February 1986. Film (Warsaw), 16 February 1986. Film Fran?ais (Paris), 21 February 1986. Luft, H., in Films in Review (New York), May 1986. Rubenstein, Lenny, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 14, no. 3, 1986. Erens, Patricia, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1986. Pym, John, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1986. Interview with Lanzmann, in Time Out (London), 12 November 1986. Interview with Lanzmann, in City Limits (London), 13 Novem- ber 1986. Sweet, Louise, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1987. Listener (London), 15 and 22 October 1987. Sandor, T., in Filmkultura (Budapest), no. 1, 1990. Williams, L., ‘‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 3, 1993. Suranyi, V. and F. Eros, ‘‘A megsemmisites metaforai,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), February 1993. Louvish, Simon, and Philip Strick, ‘‘Witness/ Schindler’s List,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 3, March 1994. Roy, L, ‘‘L’infatigable image ou les horizons du temps au cinema,’’ in Cinemas, vol. 5, no. 1/2, 1994. Slaving, J., ‘‘The Butterflies in the Bonfire: The Holocaust as Art, Part Two,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), vol. 99, Sum- mer 1994. Hartman, G., ‘‘The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List,’’ in Salamagundi, no. 106/107, Spring/Summer 1995. Hansen, M.B., ‘‘Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Com- mandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,’’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996. LaCapra, D., ‘‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why,’’’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997. Olin, M., ‘‘Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film,’’ in Representations, vol. 57, Winter 1997. *** Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s 9? hour-meditation on the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, is possibly the only documentary film that contains no imagery of its central subject. We see many interviews with survivors; we see the sites of the camps today; we see footage of the once-Nazi corporations of modern Germany. There are interviews with present-day Poles who lived through the Nazi occu- pation and who make no attempt to hide their past and present anti- Semitism; there are interviews with holocaust historians; there are interviews with ‘‘former’’ Nazis. But what Lanzmann excludes is the SHOAH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1102 Shoah imagery that we’ve seen in every other film about the period: footage of the Jewish ghettoes, of the emaciated camp survivors, of the piles of corpses. Lanzmann’s film thus takes the form of a whirlpool swirling around a void, a hurricane with an empty center. The film’s great length is not an accident, nor an act of directorial arrogance. It is necessitated in part by the many small facts that Lanzmann wished to accumulate, in imitation of the method of a historian in the film who speaks of starting with tiny facts and hoping thereby to reach the whole. But it is also a way of asserting the importance of the subject; the running time cannot be easily accommodated into a daily sched- ule, but rather cuts significantly into one’s living time. Most of all, the almost endless accretion of details and witnesses over many hours serves to deepen one’s sense of an awful and unseen void. With every passing minute the film’s chasm becomes ever more yawning, its unimaginably inhuman heart ever more incomprehensible. Lanzmann’s exclusion of corpse and prisoner footage is partly a reaction to the overuse of such footage in previous films about the Nazi period. But there is a more important reason for this exclusion. The filmmaker understands the extent to which in any film an image of something inevitably advocates its subject. There is something about the intimacy between viewer and image that makes it very hard to imagine a film which unequivocally condemns its own imagery. Such condemnation may be a part of a film, conveyed through sound, intertitles, editing, or cinematography, but inevitably the primary intimacy that exists between viewer and screen renders any such condemnation ambiguous at best. To show footage of corpses is in some sense to traffic in murder. Lanzmann further understands that the reality of the Nazi geno- cide for our present time cannot be conveyed through a corpse, which no longer holds the life that makes the human form meaningful to us. He has quoted Emil Fackenheim: ‘‘The European Jews massacred are not just of the past, they are the presence of an absence.’’ It is the lives unlived, the generations that can never be born, that represent the true meaning, for us, of the Nazi horror. But this unrealized and unrealizable possibility is an abstraction beyond all imagery, and it is out of a desire to be true not to the Nazi vision-corpses—but to the vision we might wish to have today—of the ineffable lost possibilities, of an eternal emptiness—that Lanzmann has constructed his film around a void. The impossibility of ever representing what happened and its continuing consequences is a theme throughout the film. Lanzmann’s SHONENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1103 first witness, a rare Treblinka survivor, begins the film by saying, ‘‘This is an untellable story.’’ He then proceeds to describe the indescribable: how as a young boy shot in the head but not killed, he hid amidst a pile of corpses. Near the film’s end, the camera slowly zooms in on a greyish pond while a voice-over explains that the ashes of thousands of cremated Jews were dumped here. As we zoom closer and closer to the water, we see less and less detail, as the screen fills with grey. Lanzmann has found a perfect metaphor for the impossibil- ity of forming a mental image of the cremated ashes of thousands, of the impossibility of ever taking measure, in cinema or in the mind, of genocide. Throughout the film Lanzmann repeats an image of the main entrance gate at Auschwitz, shot from a train car approaching on a railroad track, the camera thus assuming the position of an entering prisoner. In each view, we move closer, but finally Lanzmann takes us through the gates not on the tracks but via a zoom. By shifting from a movement through space to a mechanical, lens-created effect, Lanzmann acknowledges the impossibility of our ever retracing the prisoner’s steps. Neither he, nor we, can ever relive what they went through, and so, in an act of the profoundest respect, he remains physically outside the gates, entering only in the mind’s eye. These poetic renderings of the unimaginable are countered by the film’s careful accretion of facts. We hear former Nazis fail to acknowledge that they did anything wrong, even as one describes in great detail the many trains he routed. Lanzmann also includes his own subterfuges—we see him lie to a Nazi to get his testimony—and his own rage, as when he confronts a former SS man with his camera, trying to get him to talk. The film thus achieves a remarkable balance. Lanzmann gives us many facts about the Nazi methods, as well as a haunting evocation of the result of those methods, a result that transcends all possible imagery. It wouldn’t be correct to say he gives us the ‘‘Nazi side’’ (would anyone wish for that?), but he does let several Nazis speak— one even sings a song about the ‘‘glories’’ of Treblinka—and juxtaposes that with hints of his own rage. All possible ethical approaches to his subject are included; the excluded methods are those that would be false to the spirit of those who were killed. —Fred Camper SHOESHINE See SCIUSCIA SHONEN (Boy) Japan, 1969 Director: Nagisa Oshima Production: Sozo-sha and A.T.G.; Eastmancolor with black and white sequences, 35mm, Cinemascope; running time: 97 minutes; length: 2,676 meters. Released 1969, Japan. Producers: Masayuki Nakajima and Takuji Yamaguchi; screen- play: Tsutomu Tamura; photography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka and Seizo Sengen; editor: Sueko Shiraishi; sound: Hideo Nishizaki; sound effects: Akira Suzuki; art director: Jusho Toda; music: Hikaru Hayashi. Cast: Tetsuo Abe (Toshio); Fumio Watanabe (Father); Akiko Koyama (Stepmother); Tsuyoshi Kinoshita (Little brother). Publications Books: Cameron, Ian, Second Wave, New York, 1970. Sato, Tadao, Oshima Nagisa no sekai (The World of Nagisa Oshima), Tokyo, 1973. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Oshima, Nagisa, Ecrits (1956–1978): Dissolution et jaillissement, Paris, 1980. Tessier, Max, editor, Le Cinéma japonais au présent 1959–79, Paris, 1980. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema (in English), Tokyo, 1982. Magrelli, Enrico, and Emanuela Martini, Il rito, il rivolta: Il cinema di Nagisa Oshima, Rome, 1984. Polan, Dana B., The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Danvers, Louis, and Charles Tatum, Nagisa Oshima, Paris, 1986. Turim, Maureen Cheryn, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast, Berkeley, 1998. Articles: Cameron, Ian, ‘‘Nagisa Oshima,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1969–70. ‘‘Oshima,’’ in Film (London), Spring 1970. Strick, Philip, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1970. Tarratt, Margaret, in Films and Filming (London), August 1970. Delmas, J., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), November 1972. Burch, No?l, ‘‘Nagisa Oshima and Japanese Cinema in the 60s,’’ in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Richard Roud, Lon- don, 1980. ‘‘Nagisa Oshima Section’’ of Contracampo (Madrid), July-Au- gust 1980. Suga, S., ‘‘Campaigner in the World of the Absurd: Nagisa Oshima,’’ in Framework (Norwich), nos. 26–27, 1985. Steinborn, B., and C. G?ldenboog, ‘‘Ein Gespr?ch mit Nagisa Oshima. Der Tod geschieht fortw?hrend,’’ in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), August- September 1985. Vinke, Hermann, ‘‘Japan’s ‘World Citizen,’’’ in World Press Review, vol. 33, April 1986. Casebier, A., ‘‘Oshima in Contemporary Theoretical Perspective,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 9, no. 2, 1987. ‘‘Nagisa Oshima,’’ in UNESCO Courier, July-August 1995. *** SIBERIADE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1104 Based on a real event which shocked Japan in the mid 1960s, Shonen depicts a family that travels the country, collecting out-of- court settlement money in automobile accident scams. The film is clearly Nagisa Oshima’s: thematically, it deals with crimes; it is based on a real event; and it develops many of his stylistic devices. The character of the lazy and self-indulgent father, for example, represents the victim complex that Oshima sees as typical of the postwar Japanese mentality. The character serves as a microcosm of the problems of the patriarchal Japanese emperor state. Oshima’s criticism is ultimately of a society where uneducated and unskilled parents can use and exploit their own children in illegal schemes. The cruelty of the authorities is shown by the arrest of the family after they have given up their life of crime and settled in the city. The omnipresence of state authority is conveyed by the Japanese national flags: in the street, in the hand of the baby, on the boat, and in the background. Basically, the film follows a linear narrative, though it includes many experimental stylistic devices, such as the occasional insertion of black-and-white footage. The first insert, showing the family’s flight to a new town, works like a fantasy scene. The second insert, a car accident, masks the colors of the blood and the victim’s red boot. Later, when the film returns to color, the viewers are shocked by the red of the blood and the boot in the white snow (corresponding to the colors of the Japanese flag). There are occasional suspensions of sound as well as the use of still photographs accompanied by the boy’s narration reminiscent of a school composition, and newspaper clips accompanied by a news- reel-like narration. Other such techniques used to emphasize impor- tant points include: the slow-motion scene of the boy (never called by name throughout the film) destroying the snowman, one of the few scenes in which he displays strong emotion, and the theatrical setting where the father fights with the mother and the son beside what appears to be a funeral altar in front of a large national flag. In addition, Oshima often deliberately confuses the sense of time between shots. Abstract music, often resembling actual sounds, is used disjoint- edly with the image, and the intentional decentralization of the Cinemascope composition is visually jarring as many actions take place on the far left or right side of the screen. Such stylistic techniques are intended to destroy our suspension of disbelief and therefore destroy our subconscious identification with (and sympathy for) the main characters. Oshima is careful not to trivialize his subject by sentimentalizing it. He avoids this all-too-easy trap by, for example, never using music to enhance the character’s emotion. Shonen does not make simplistic judgments on the characters or the situations. We simply see the boy’s solitude, playing by himself and pretending to visit his grandmother. Only twice in the film do we see his tears, despite all the mental and physical exploitation he suffers. We are never told why the boy keeps silent after his family is arrested. Instead, on many levels and in many subtle ways, this film urges us to think. Perhaps for this reason, this film was more successful critically than commercially. —Kyoko Hirano SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER See TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET See OBCHOD NA KORZE SIBERIADE (The Siberiad) USSR, 1979 Director: Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky Production: Mosfilm Studios; Sovcolour and black and white, 35mm; running time: 206 minutes. Released in USSR in 1979; released in USA 1979, IFEX; US video release, Kino International, 1994. Filmed on location in Siberia and in Moscow. Screenplay: Valentin Yezhov and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky; photography: Levan Paatashvili; editor: Valentina Kulagina; mu- sic: Edouard Artemiev; sound: Valentin Bobrovsky; production designer: Nikolai Dvigubsky; newsreel director: Artur Peleshian. Cast: Vladimir Smailov (Afanassi Ustiuzhanin); Vitaly Solomina (Nikolai Ustiuzhanin); Nathalia Andreitchenko (Anastassia Solomina); Erqueni Petrov (Evofei); Mikhail Knonov (Radion); Nikita Mikhalkov (Alexei Ustiuzhanin); Liudmila Gourtchenko (Taya Solomina); Sergei Shakourov (Spiridou Solomin); Pavel Kadochnikov (Eternal Grandad); Yelena Koreneva (Young Taya); Igor Okhlupin (Filipp Solomin); Ruslan Mikaberidze (Tofik); Vsevolod Larionov (Fyodor Nikolayevich). Publications Books: Goulding, Daniel J., editor, Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Bloomington, 1989. Zorkaya, Neya, The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema, Hippocrene Books (New York), 1989. Lawton, Anna, editor, The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, Routledge (London and New York), 1992. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduc- tion, McGraw Hill (New York), 1994. Articles: Variety (New York), 6 June 1979. Logette, L., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1979. Martin, M., Ecran (Paris), October 1979. Haustrate, G., Cinéma (Paris), November 1979. Bosseno, C., and others, Image et Son (Paris), December 1979. Daney, S., Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1979. Sterritt, David, ‘‘Siberiade: A Provocative Glimpse of Russian History—Filmmaker Compares US and Soviet Attitudes,’’ in The Christian Science Monitor, vol. 74, 23 September 1982. SIBERIADEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1105 Siberiade Wise, Naomi, in San Francisco, vol. 24, December 1982. Menashe, L., Cineaste (New York), 1983. Menashe, L., ‘‘Glasnost in the Soviet Cinema,’’ Cineaste (New York), 1987–88. Jaehue, Karen, ‘‘Family Ties: An Interview with Nikita and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky,’’ Cineaste (New York), 1987–88. *** An auteur with many styles, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky is an extravert filmmaker whose imagination often needs a wake-up call from the outside. He has banked on the literary classics (Turgenev’s Nest of Gentry and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya); genre stereotypes (Romance of the Lovers); other directors’ concepts (Akira Kurosawa’s script for Runaway Train); and his own past (his 1994 Ryaba My Chicken is a ‘‘sequel’’ to his 1967 Asya’s Happiness). In 1979, three years after the release of 1900, Konchalovsky made Siberiade, an epic as indebted to Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece as it was ambitious, beautiful, and uneven. Like 1900, Siberiade scans several decades, from the early days of the century to the 1960s. Like 1900, it focuses on several generations of two families—one rich, one poor—which are the entire population of the village of Elan in the midst of the Siberian swamps. Like 1900, it is a Tolstoyan novel of a movie, overpopulated with well- and not- so-well developed characters who appear and disappear like patterns in a kaleidoscope; broad and deliberately paced; keen on detail; determinist in its view of history; and in love with a landscape. Like 1900, it is exhaustingly long—3.5 hours—(in Russia it was first shown as a 4-part television mini-series) and hard to embrace at one sitting. It also contains at least one direct reference to Bertolucci’s film in the scene where a boy, armed with a rifle, guards a village ‘‘capitalist’’ whose time has passed. Every historical epic, from Quo Vadis to Gone With the Wind, from Intolerance to Apocalypse Now, is driven by a secret desire to exhaust the subject and the genre. Siberiade, whose title suggests nothing less than that we see its creator as a Homer of moving images, succeeds unyieldingly in this. The film is confidently directed by Konchalovsky who remains unintimidated by the scope of the story, breathtakingly photographed by Levan Paatashvili, and per- fectly cast, with a stand-out performance by Nikita Mikhalkov, Konchalovsky’s half-brother and director of Slave of Love, Dark Eyes, and Close to Eden. But the true meaning and charm of Siberiade THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1106 comes from the tension that sets it aside from other epics—the tension between the film’s ambition and the historical circumstances under which this ambition had to be realized. The oblivious 1970s were hardly the best time in Russia to probe history, but inability to tell the whole truth, strangely, works for and not against Siberiade. To offset the film’s historical stance, unavoid- ably official, Konchalovsky plays out history as a grand melodrama that stretches and strives to be a tragedy. Bertolucci opened with Verdi’s death and closed at the end of World War II, because in the first forty-five years of this century he found the arena for a tragedy of global proportions: the death of aristocracy, rebirth of the proletariat, and ruthless march of the Fascist bourgeoisie. Konchalovsky’s chronology is more arbitrary: he skips the l950s and closes in the 1960s, but it says very little about his understanding of historical processes and logistics. While Bertolucci’s drama served the history, Konchalovsky’s history serves the drama. In the heat of the decline of the communist empire, Soviet culture was made either by sell-outs, or by escapists. A totalitarian state gives its own interpretation to escapism—not from the hardships of life, but from tenets of ideology. Some artists, like Tarkovsky, escaped into cerebral esoterica of ‘‘auterism’’; some, like Nikita Mikhalkov, into the stylized past; some, like the director of Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov, into Hollywood-style melodrama; some, like Georgian filmmakers, into folklore. This may be why Russian intelligentsia adored Garcia Marquez, as a loophole into the world unconstrained by the laws of materialist dialectics. Konchalovsky, in a rare attempt to materialize ‘‘magic realism,’’ creates a world in which the truth comes not from the newspaper Pravda, but from a star, shining over the village of Elan as a reminder of a higher order, and from pine-trees that talk and weep. In this world, animals listen to people, and those who listen to animals don’t age. That this world is a compromise between magic and dogma is an important part of what Siberiade is really about. —Michael Brashinsky SIEGFRIED See DIE NIBELUNGEN THE SILENCE See TYSTNADEN THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS USA, 1991 Director: Jonathan Demme Production: Orion Pictures, A Strong Heart/Demme Production; Technicolour, Panavision; running time: 118 minutes. Producer: Edward Saxon, Kenneth Utt, Ron Bozman; screenplay: Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris; photography: Tak Fujimoto; editor: Craig McKay; assistant directors: Ron Bozman, Kyle McCarthy, Steve Rose, Gina Leonetti; production design: Kristi Zea; art director: Tim Galvin; music: Howard Shore; sound editor: Skip Lievsay; sound recording: Christopher Newman, John Fundus, Alan Snelling. Cast: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling); Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter); Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford); Ted Levine (Jamie Gumm); Anthony Heald (Dr. Frederick Chilton); Brooke Smith (Catherine Martin). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Hop- kins), Best Actress (Foster), Best Adapted Screenplay, 1991. Publications Books: Kael, Pauline, Pauline Kael on Jonathan Demme: A Selection of Reviews Accompanying the Retrospective Jonathan Demme: An American Director, Minneapolis, 1988. Demme, Jonathan, ‘‘Demme on Demme,’’ in Projections, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, London, 1992. Falk, Quentin, Anthony Hopkins: The Authorized Biography, New York, 1993. Garber, Marjorie, and Jann Matlock, editors, Media Spectacles, New York, 1993. Bliss, Michael, and Christiana Banks, What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme, Carbondale,1996. Smolen, Diane, The Films of Jodie Foster, Secaucus, 1996. Articles: Variety (New York), 11 February 1991. Seidenberg, R., American Film (Washington D.C.), February 1991. Katsahnias, I., ‘‘La puritaine,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1991. Ross, P., ‘‘Papillon de mort,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), April 1991. Rouyer, P., ‘‘Le complexe du papillon,’’ in Positif (Paris), April 1991. Jean, M., ‘‘Le sang de l’agneau,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), Spring 1991. Bahiana, A.N., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), May 1991. Taubin, A., ‘‘Killing Men,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), May 1991. Magil, M., Films in Review (New York), May-June 1991. Francke, L., Sight and Sound (London), June 1991. Caron, A., Séquences (Montreal), June 1991. Garsault, A., ‘‘Du conte et du mythe,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1991. Tharp, J., ‘‘The Transvestite as Monster’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Maryland), Fall 1991. Greenberg, H.R., ‘‘Psychotherapy at the Simplex,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Maryland), Summer 1992. Nevers, C., ‘‘A l’ombre des serial killers,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1992. Sundelson, D., ‘‘The Demon Therapist and Other Dangers,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Maryland), Spring 1993. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1107 The Silence of the Lambs Beller, J.L., ‘‘The Radical Imagination in American Film,’’ in Crea- tive Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1994. Redman, Nick, Tri Fritz, and Ted Elrick, ‘‘Lambs, Wolves and Carpenters,’’ in DGA Magazine (Los Angeles), vol. 19, no. 6, December-January 1994–1995. Reichman, R., ‘‘I Second That Emotion,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1995. Kennedy, A.L., ‘‘He Knows About Crazy,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 6, June 1995. Sihvonen, J., ‘‘Technobody Metamorphoses,’’ in Lahikuva (Truku), vol. 3, 1995. Stewart, J.A., ‘‘The Feminine Hero of Silence of the Lambs,’’ in San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 1995. Tally, Ted, in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 1995. Lippy, Tod, ‘‘Adapting The Silence of the Lambs,’’ in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 1995. Weis, E., ‘‘Synch Tanks,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 21, no. 1/2, 1995. Wolfe, C., and J. Elmer, ‘‘Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoa- nalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs,’’ in Boundary 2, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995. Negra, Diane, ‘‘Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Nor- man Bates, and Buffalo Bill,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 24, no. 2, April 1996. Bishop, Ellen, ‘‘Film Frames: Cinematic Literacy and Satiric Vio- lence in Contemporary Movies,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 16, no. 2, Winter-Spring 1997. Fleck, Patrice, ‘‘Looking in the Wrong Direction: Displacement and Literacy in the Hollywood Serial Killer Drama,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 16, no. 2, 1997. Hantke, Steffen, ‘‘‘The Kingdom of the Unimaginable’: The Con- struction of Social Space and the Fantasy of Privacy in Serial Killer Narratives,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 3, July 1998. *** The Silence of the Lambs is the most authentically terrifying movie since Psycho, and it is appropriate that Hannibal Lecter (as incarnated in the superb performance of Anthony Hopkins) should have estab- lished a position within our culture’s popular mythology comparable to that of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates three decades earlier. By ‘‘authentically’’ I mean that the terror the film induces is not merely a matter of contrived ‘‘shock’’ moments (though, as in Psycho, those are not lacking). The film brings us into intimate and disturbing contact with the darkest potentialities of the human psyche and, by locating the existence of the serial killer within a context of ‘‘normal- ity,’’ connects it to those manifestations of what one might call the SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1108 ‘‘normal psychosis’’ of the human race which we read about daily in our newspapers: the practice of ‘‘ethnic cleansing,’’ the protracted torture and eventual murder of a teenager by ‘‘peacemakers’’ in Somalia, the horrors of child abuse (sexual, physical, psychological) that are the product of our concept of ‘‘family’’ and the guarantee of their own continuance into future generations. The humanity of Hannibal Lecter is clearly a central issue: if we see Lecter as only a monster, quite distinct from ourselves, then the film fails, becomes ‘‘just another horror movie’’; as Jodie Foster says of Lecter in the laser disc commentary, ‘‘he just wants to be accepted as a human being.’’ Therefore the filmmakers’ problem lies in persuading us to do just that without ever becoming complicit in his obsessions (killing and eating other human beings): a difficult and dangerous tightrope to walk. It is their degree of success that distinguishes the film from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the fascination exerted by the monstrous cannibal family is not countered by any adequate positive force, the undercharacterized victims mere objects for torment, the film (for all its undeniable power) degenerating into an exercise in sadism. The success is not complete: it seems to me that Jonathan Demme made two unfortunate errors of judgment. The first is the excision of a crucial sequence that was shot and is included in the supplement to the Criterion laser disc. This sequence includes Lecter’s ‘‘psycho- logical profile’’ of the serial killer, accompanied by evocative track- ing-shots around Jamie Gumm’s living quarters, in which he explains to Clarice Starling that a serial killer was a severely abused child (a theory for which there is a great deal of factual support), and that Gumm grew up with no sense of identity whatever, so that his attempts to construct one are unreal fabrications. The scene would have partly answered the widespread complaint that Gumm is pre- sented as gay, reinforcing a malicious popular stereotype; it would also have linked the phenomenon of the serial killer to familial practices we now know to be all too common. I find the decision to suppress it inexplicable. The second error (for which the screenwriter Ted Tally must share responsibility) is the film’s famous last line, Lecter’s ‘‘I’m having an old friend for dinner.’’ Ironically, Tally complains at length (in the commentary on the laser disc’s alternative audio track) about the appropriation of Lecter for ‘‘camp’’ purposes, that so many young people find him smart and seductive and even collect Lecter memora- bilia: that last line precisely invites such a response, especially in view of the fact that Lecter’s imminent victim Dr. Chilton/Anthony Heald is presented throughout as irredeemably despicable, enabling the audience to view his fate with equanimity and even satisfaction. The punch line is slick and funny: one can readily understand the temptation, but it is one that should have been resisted. The film’s distinction lies ultimately in its powerful and convinc- ing embodiment of the force for life, in the character of Clarice Starling, Jodie Foster’s performance matching that of Hopkins in its strength and vividness. There is another documented fact about serial killers too obvious for the film to have to state explicitly (it is enacted clearly enough): virtually all serial killers are male. Like the issue of child abuse, this reinforces the need to see the phenomenon not in terms of individual and inexplicable ‘‘monsters’’ but as intimately involved in the so-called ‘‘normal’’ actualities of the culture: the issue of gender-as-social-construction, of the cultural production of ‘‘mas- culinity’’ in terms of aggression and domination. The achievement of Demme and Foster is to create Starling both as a clearly defined and convincing character and as the embodiment of an ideal: the human being in whom the finest qualities traditionally associated with ‘‘masculinity’’ and ‘‘femininity’’ coexist in perfect balance. The film’s title derives from Starling’s definitive childhood memory: the young girl’s unsuccessful attempt to save one lamb from those waiting to be slaughtered, whose frantic bleating distressed her. The ‘‘silence’’ of the lambs is brought about only by her rescue of Gumm’s latest female victim, a feat of heroism requiring a fusion of ‘‘masculine’’ activeness, energy, reasoning and determination with the capacity for identification with the ‘‘feminine’’ vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy with the oppressed. If we recognize Lecter and Gumm as ‘human beings’ produced by the worst excesses of patriar- chal culture, we simultaneously recognize Clarice as the fully human being of a possible future. —Robin Wood SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN USA, 1952 Directors: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp.; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 103 minutes; length: 9,228 feet, Released 1952. Filmed in MGM Studios and backlots. Singin’ in the Rain SINGIN’ IN THE RAINFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1109 Producer: Arthur Freed; screenplay: Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from the play by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; photogra- phy: Harold Rosson; editor: Adrienne Fazan; sound recording supervisor: Douglas Shearer; set decoration: Edwin B. Willis and Jacques Mapes; art directors: Cedric Gibbons and Randall Duell; music director: Lennie Hayton; orchestrations: Conrad Salinger, Wally Heglin, and Skip Martin; songs: Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown, Betty Comden, and Roger Edens; vocal arrangements: Jeff Alexander; special effects: Warren Newcombe and Irving G. Ries. Cast: Gene Kelly (Don Lockwood); Donald O’Connor (Cosmo Brown); Debbie Reynolds (Kathy Selden); Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont); Millard Mitchell (R. F. Simpson); Rita Moreno (Zelda Zanders); Douglas Fowley (Roscoe Dexter); Cyd Charisse (Dancer); Madge Blake (Dora Bailey); King Donovan (Rod); Kathleen Freeman (Phoebe Dinsmore, diction coach); Bobby Watson (Diction coach); Tommy Farrell (Sid Phillips, ass’t. director); Jimmie Thompson (Male lead in ‘‘Beautiful Girls’’ number); Dan Foster (Ass’t. director); Margaret Bert (Wardrobe woman); Mae Clark (Hairdresser); Judy Landon (Olga Mara); John Dodsworth (Baron de la Bouvet de la Toulon); Stuart Holmes (J. C. Spendrill III); Dennis Ross (Don as a boy); Bill Lewin (Villain in Western, Bert); Richard Emory (Phil, cowboy hero); Julius Tannen (Man on screen); Dawn Addams and Elaine Stewart (Ladies in waiting); Carl Milletaire (Villain, ‘‘Dueling Cava- lier” and ‘‘Broadway Rhythm’’); Jac George (Orchestra leader); Wilson Wood (Vallee impersonator). Publications Script: Comden, Betty, and Adolph Green, Singin’ in the Rain, London and New York, 1972; revised edition 1986. Books: Griffith, Richard, The Films of Gene Kelly, New York, 1962. Springer, John, All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing, New York, 1966. Kobal, John, Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals, New York, 1970. Thomas, Lawrence B., The MGM Years, New York, 1972. Stern, Lee Edward, The Movie Musical, New York, 1974. Fordin, Hugh, The World of Entertainment: Hollywood’s Greatest Musicals, New York, 1975. Hirschhorn, Clive, Gene Kelly, Chicago, 1975; revised edition, Lon- don, 1984. Charness, Casey, Hollywood Cine-Dance: A Description of the Interrelationship of Camera Work and Choreography in the Films of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Altman, Rick, editor, Genre: The Musical, London, 1981. Delameter, James, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical, London, 1982. Casper, Joseph Andrew, Stanley Donen, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1985. Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical, London, 1989. Wollen, Peter, Singin’ in the Rain, London, 1992. Silverman, Stephen M., Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies, New York, 1996. La Polla, Franco, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly: Cantando sotto la pioggia, Torino, 1997. Yudkoff, Alvin, Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams, New York, 1999. Articles: Jablonski, Edward, in Films in Review (New York), April 1952. Morgan, James, in Sight and Sound (London), July-September 1952. de Baroncelli, Jean, in Le Monde (Paris), 20 September 1953. Knight, Arthur, ‘‘From Dance to Film Director,’’ in Dance (New York), August 1954. Johnson, Albert, ‘‘The 10th Muse in San Francisco,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1956. ‘‘Musical Comedy Issue’’ of Cinéma (Paris), August-September 1959. Gilson, René, in Cinéma (Paris), May 1962. Tavernier, Bertrand, and Daniel Pallas, ‘‘Entretien avec Stanley Donen,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1963. Behlmer, Rudy, ‘‘Gene Kelly,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1964. Cutts, John, ‘‘Dancer, Actor, Director,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), August and September 1964. Kelly, Gene, ‘‘Le Premier Film ‘Camp’: Singin’ in the Rain,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1971. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Cinéma (Paris), February 1973. Pasche, F., in Travelling (Lausanne), January-February 1974. Winer, Stephen, in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), no. 11, 1974. Dagneau, G., and A., in Image et Son (Paris), February 1977. Day, B., in Films and Filming (London), April 1977. Dyer, Richard, ‘‘Entertainment and Utopia,’’ in Movie (London), no. 24, 1977. Giles, Dennis, ‘‘Show-Making,’’ in Movie (London), no. 24, 1977. Mariani, J., ‘‘Come on with the Rain,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1978. Wolf, W. R., ‘‘Making Singin’ in the Rain,’’ in Film en Televisie (Brussels), March 1979. Johnson, Julia, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies, New York, 1981. Company, J. M., and J. Talens, in Contracampo (Madrid), Septem- ber 1981. Telotte, J. P., ‘‘Ideology and the Kelly-Donen Musicals,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1984. Card, J., ‘‘‘More Than Meets the Eye’ in Singin’ in the Rain and Day for Night,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1984. Biesty, P., ‘‘The Myth of the Playful Dancer,’’ in Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990. Roth, M., ‘‘Pulling the Plug on Lina Lamont,’’ in Jump Cut (Berke- ley), April 1990. Masson, A., ‘‘An Architectural Promenade,’’ in Continuum, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992. Clover, C.J., ‘‘Dancin’ in the Rain,’’ in Critical Inquiry, no. 21, no. 4, 1995. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 16, 1995. DET SJUNDE INSEGLET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1110 Chumo, Peter N., ‘‘Dance, Flexibility, and the Renewal of Genre in Singin’ in the Rain,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 1, Fall 1996. Svehla, S., ‘‘Gene Kelly,’’ in Films of the Golden Age (Muscatine), no. 10, Fall 1997. *** Traditionally, the film musical is said to have reached its pinnacle in the 1950s at MGM studios. The creative personnel at MGM responsible for this perfection were Arthur Freed, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The ‘‘golden era’’ began with On the Town (1949) and ended with Gigi (1958); between were An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Bandwagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It’s Always Fair Weather, and Funny Face. With the exception of On the Town, all were originally conceived for the screen. They were, in a sense, the last of their kind, because the early 1950s began the great mass adaptions of Broadway musicals. As television began to effect box office returns, the studios were hesitant to produce big budget musicals unless they were proven hits. All were developments on Arthur Freed’s concept of organic integration. The production numbers would, ideally, grow directly out of the emotional needs of the characters or would serve as plot motivation. Song and dance would replace dialogue as a means of discourse. Whether or not this is the perfect structure for the musical is debatable. Richard Dyer feels that critical stances which champion this form recapitulate the dominant ideology. In ‘‘Entertainment and Utopia,’’ he states that entertainment is escapist/wish-fulfilling, a long- ing for something better—a literal Utopia. Musicals manage contra- dictions in the system (music/narrative, success/failure, love/hate, wealth/poverty, male/female) on all levels in such a way as to make them disappear. A film that offers no distinction between narrative (reality) and musical numbers (escapist fantasy) suggests that the narrative is also (already) Utopian. The films of the 1950s can be seen as the most ideologically repressive, because of the ease in which that ideology can be hidden. Of the musicals of the 1950s, Singin’ in the Rain is the best remembered. In 1977, the American Film Institute conducted a poll that listed Singin’ in the Rain as one of the top ten American films. ‘‘Singin’ in the Rain is generally accepted as the apogee of screen musical art, a virtually faultless film by any standards’’ says Arthur Jackson, in The Best Musicals. Clive Hirschorn notes that Singin’ in the Rain, released ‘‘. . . on the heels of An American in Paris, did not receive the glowing reviews of the Gershwin film . . . . Over the years, however, it has surpassed An American in Paris in popularity and is now recognized as one of the all time greats.’’ Following so closely behind An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain was not as generally well received. Time felt it was ‘‘without much warmth or wit,’’ and Newsweek called it ‘‘sluggish.’’ It was nominated for only two Oscars; Jean Hagen for supporting actress and musical score. Not- withstanding, it was listed as one of the best films of 1952 by the National Board of Review and Films in Review, was the number one money-making film in April 1952, and number ten money-making film of the same year. Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also wrote On the Town), the screenplay won the award for best writing in an American musical from the Writers Guild of America. The work of Comden and Green usually ridiculed an industry (filmmaking in Singin’ in the Rain, theater in The Bandwagon, and television in It’s Always Fair Weather) but without bitterness; ‘‘there was always wit, and so they were able to create musical movies full of joy that were still effective satire,’’ says Stephen Winer in Velvet Light Trap. Based on a catalogue of songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the film spoofed the turmoils of the transition from silent to sound film. Originally planned for Howard Keel, who was extremely popular at that time, it eventually shifted to accommodate the persona of Gene Kelly, who also co-directed with Stanley Donen. Kelly’s career is firmly rooted in film history not only for his solo routine to the title song, but also because of the ‘‘Broadway Rhythm’’ ballet. As expensive (in rehearsal/shooting time and overall cost) as the climac- tic ballet from An American in Paris, it was also as out of place. Gene Kelly commented on the ‘‘Broadway Rhythm’’ ballet at an American Film Institute symposium in 1979. Not being able to use Donald O’Connor or Debbie Reynolds, ‘‘we got Cyd Charisse and just wrote a whole ballet and stuck it in. That’s how it came about. We had to have a number there. We never meant it to be that long, but since we were introducing a new character into the show, we had to keep adding to it and adding to it. It went on for hours, it seems.’’ Donald O’Connor is possibly best remembered for his song and dance solo ‘‘Make Em Laugh,’’ an athletic tour-de-force that helped him win the Golden Globe for Best Actor in 1952. Singin’ in the Rain was Debbie Reynolds’s third film for MGM and her first major role. Reportedly he age (she was only 19) and lack of professional experience was problematic. Playing the role of an understudy who dubs the voice of a silent star, she was dubbed by Betty Noyes for the singing and by Jean Hagen for the lines Debbie was supposedly dubbing for Jean Hagen’s character, Lina Lamont. Dennis Giles, offers a psycho-analytical reading of The Band- wagon and Singin’ in the Rain that is particularly interesting. He sees the successful production of the show (in Singin’ in the Rain, the revamping of The Duelling Cavalier into The Singing Cavalier) as a visually uncensored form of love-making. ‘‘The private show of love is displayed through the vehicle of the public spectacle: the lovers sing and dance to each other as if they were alone, at the same time that they openly display this love to the on-screen (diegetic) audience and to ourselves, the off-screen spectators.’’ A successful show guarantees a consummated relationship between the male and female leads. Needless to say, The Singing Cavalier is a hit and Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds embrace as Singin’ in the Rain fades out. —Greg S. Faller SIR ARNE’S TREASURE See HERR ARNES PENGAR DET SJUNDE INSEGLET (The Seventh Seal) Sweden, 1957 Director: Ingmar Bergman Production: Svensk Filmindustri; black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes. Released 16 February 1957, Stockholm. Filmed in DET SJUNDE INSEGLETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1111 Det sjunde inseglet the Summer of 1956 in Svensk Filmindustri’s studios, R?sunda, Sweden, and on location at Hovs Hallar, Sweden. Producer: Allan Ekelund; screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, from his dramatic sketch Wood Painting; photography: Gunnar Fischer; editor: Lennart Wallin; sound: Aaby Wedin and Lennart Wallin; special sound effects: Evald Andersson; sets: P. A. Lundgren; music: Erik Nordgren; costume designer: Manne Lindholm. Cast: Bengt Ekerot (Death); Nils Poppe (Joff); Max von Sydow (The Knight, Antonius Blok); Bibi Andersson (Mia); Inga Gill (Lisa); Maud Hansson (Tyan, the witch); Inga Landgré (Knight’s wife); Gunnal Lindblom (The girl); Berto Anderberg (Raval); Anders Ek (Monk); Ake Fridell (Plog, the smith); Gunnar Olsson (Church painter); Erik Strandmark (Skat); Benkt-?ke Benktsson (The mer- chant); Gudrum Brost (Woman at the inn); Ulf Johansson (Leader of the soldiers); Lars Lind (The young monk); Gunnar B?rnstrand (J?ns, the squire). Awards: Cannes Film Festival, Special Prize, 1957. Publications Script: Bergman, Ingmar, The Seventh Seal, in Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1960; also published separately, London and New York, 1963. Books: Béranger, Jean, Ingmar Bergman et ses films, Paris, 1959. H??k, Marianne, Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1962. Chiaretti, Tommaso, Ingmar Bergman, Rome, 1964. Donner, J?rn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Blooming- ton, Indiana, 1964. Nelson, David, Ingmar Bergman: The Search for God, Boston, 1964. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1968. Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Wood, Robin, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Sj?gren, Henrik, Regi: Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1970. DET SJUNDE INSEGLET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1112 Young, Vernon, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, New York, 1971. Steene, Birgitta, Focus on the Seventh Seal, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Bj?rkman, Stig, and others, editors, Bergman on Bergman, New York, 1973. Ranieri, Tino, Ingmar Bergman, Florence, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart, editor, Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1975. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Ingmar Bergman and Society, San Diego, 1978. Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and the First-Person Film, Princeton, 1978. Marion, Denis, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1979. Manvell, Roger, Ingmar Bergman: An Appreciation, New York, 1980. Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, Bos- ton, 1981. Petric, Vlada, editor, Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, New York, 1981. Cowie, Peter, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York, 1982. Livingston, Paisley, Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1982. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Jones, William G., editor, Talking with Bergman, Dallas, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1983. Slayton, Ralph Emil, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal: A Criti- cism, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1983. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham, North Carolina, 1986. Bergman, Ingmar, Laterna Magica, Stockholm, 1987; as The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, London, 1988. Cohen, James, Through a Lens Darkly, New York, 1991. Bjorkman, Stig, Torsten Maans, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Cambridge, 1993. Cohen, Hubert I., Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York, 1993. Long, Robert Emmet, Ingmar Bergman: Film & Stage, New York, 1994. Tornqvist, Egil, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam, 1995. Blackwell, Marilyn J., Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Rochester, 1997. Michaels, Lloyd, editor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, New York, 1999; revised edition, Cambridge, 2000. Articles: Dyer, Peter John, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1958. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 8 March 1958. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 9 March 1958. Rohmer, Eric, ‘‘Avec Le Septième Sceau Bergman nous offre son Faust,’’ in Arts (Paris), 23 April 1958. Mambrino, Jean, ‘‘Traduit du silence,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1958. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), November 1958. Allombert, Guy, in Image et Son (Paris), February 1959. Young, Colin, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1959. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘The Rack of Life,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1959. Holland, Norman, ‘‘The Seventh Seal: The Film as Iconography,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Summer 1959. Jarvie, Ian, ‘‘Notes on the Films of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Film Journal (Melbourne), November 1959. Sarris, Andrew, in Film Culture (New York), no.19, 1959. Time (New York), 14 March 1960. Simon, John, ‘‘Ingmar, the Image-Maker,’’ in Mid-Century (New York), December 1960. Napolitano, Antonio, ‘‘Dal settimo sigillo alle soglie della vita,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), May-June 1961. Furstenau, Theo, ‘‘Apocalypse und Totentantz,’’ in Die Zeit, 16 February 1962. Cowie, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), January 1963. Steene, Birgitta, ‘‘The Isolated Hero of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September 1965. Scott, James F., ‘‘The Achievement of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Arts (Cleveland, Ohio), Winter 1965. Bergman, Ingmar, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1970. Steene, Birgitta, ‘‘The Milk and the Strawberry Sequence in The Seventh Seal,” in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Summer 1973. Helman, A., ‘‘Ingmar Bergman albo parabola pytan odwiecznych,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), August 1974. Wimberly, Darryl, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 15 September 1977. Malmkjaer, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1978. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies 2, New York, 1983. Pressler, M., ‘‘The Idea Fused in the Fact: Bergman and The Seventh Seal,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1985. Winterson, J., ‘‘Bloodied with Optimism,’’ in Sight & Sound (Lon- don), vol. 1, May 1991. Trasatti, S., ‘‘Bergman, il paradosso di un ‘Ateo cristiano,’’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), November-December 1991. ‘‘Det Sjunde inseglet Section’’ in Avant Scène du Cinéma (Paris), March 1992. Lucas, Tim, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), vol. 33, 1996. Merjui, Darius, ‘‘The Shock of Revelation,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 6, June 1997. *** The Seventh Seal is one of the films in Ingmar Bergman’s mature, highly individualized style, coming after an initial period he considers merely an imitative apprenticeship, in which he made films in the style of other directors. It was derived from a dramatic sketch, Wood Painting, which Bergman had written in 1954 for his drama students in Malm?. The Seventh Seal was made on a very low budget in 35 days. In his late thirties, Bergman was still struggling with religious doubts and problems after having been reared very strictly in the Protestant Lutheran tradition, his father having been a prominent Swedish pastor. The Seventh Seal, which Bergman has termed an oratorio, is the first of three films (the others being The Face and The Virgin Spring) made at this time in which he tried to purge the uglier aspects of religious practice and persecution, as well as confront the absence of any sign of response from God to human craving for help and reassurance. As the film makes clear at the beginning, the title SKUPLIJACI PERJAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1113 refers to God’s book of secrets sealed by seven seals; only after the breaking of the seventh seal will the secret of life, God’s great secret, be revealed. In Bergman on Bergman he is quoted as saying, ‘‘For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? or doesn’t God exist?. . . If God doesn’t exist, what do we do then? . . . What I believed in those days—and believed in for a long time—was the existence of a virulent evil, in no way dependent upon environmental or hereditary factors . . . an active evil, of which human beings, as opposed to animals, have a monopoly.’’ He regards the 1950s as a period of personal convulsion, the remnants of his faith altering with a strength- ening scepticism. In The Seventh Seal, Antonius Blok, a 14th-century knight, returns home with his earthy, sensual squire, J?ns, after a decade of crusading in the Holy Land. He finds his native country plague-stricken and the people, haunted by a sense of guilt, given over to self-persecution, flagellation, and witch-hunting, a movement induced by a fantastic and sadistic monk, Raval. The Knight, God’s servant-at-arms, finds that he has lost his faith and can no longer pray. In the midst of his spiritual turmoil, he is suddenly confronted by the personification of Death, a figure cloaked and implacable, who coldly informs him that his time has come. The Knight, unable to accept demise when in a state of doubt, wins a brief reprieve by challenging Death to a game of chess, the traditional ploy adopted by those seeking more time on earth, for Death is supposedly unable to resist such a challenge. The film, Bergman has said, is ‘‘about the fear of death.’’ Bergman had been steeped since childhood in the kind of imagery portrayed in this film, with its legendary concepts and simple pictorial forms; he had looked endlessly at the mural paintings that decorate the medieval Swedish churches. A painter of such images appears in the film, contriving studies of death to frighten the faithful. The stark but theatrical Christian imagery comes to life in The Seventh Seal. The Knight wins a brief reprieve, but Death still stalks his native land as the plague takes hold, and continues to haunt him with constant reappearances. The Knight demands: Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should he hide himself in a midst of half- spoken promises and unseen miracles? . . . What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to? . . . Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse him and want to tear him out of my heart? . . . I want knowledge, not faith. . . . I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal himself to me. . . . In our fear, we make an image and that image we call God. But death has no answers, and God is silent. As for J?ns, he is faithful to his master, but cynical about the horrors of the Crusades: ‘‘Our crusade,’’ he says, ‘‘was such madness that only a genuine idealist could have thought it up . . . . This damned ranting about doom. Is that good for the minds of modern people?’’ He prefers the simplicity of drink and fornication. To him Christianity is just ‘‘ghost stories.’’ In total contrast to the Knight’s fearful dilemmas concerning faith and self-persecution is the position of Joff, a poor travelling enter- tainer and his beautiful young wife Mia. Joff, in his simplicity of heart, has continual visions of the Virgin and Child. Although Mia laughs lovingly at his excitement following the vision, she is happy to share his unquestioning faith. Only with these unpretentious people does the Knight find solace, ‘‘Everything I have said seems meaning- less and unreal while I sit here with you and your husband,’’ he says. Mia gives him milk and wild strawberries to eat, the latter symbols of spring or rebirth. It is, as Brigitta Steene suggests in her book on Bergman, a kind of private Eucharist which momentarily redeems the Knight from his doubts. It is only to be expected that Joff is hunted and persecuted by the puritanical and guilt-ridden religious commu- nity he seeks innocently to amuse. At the close, when the chain-dance of Death tops the horizon, it is Joff and Mia who are spared by the Knight’s intervention when he distracts Death while they escape. The Knight and his Lady have to accept death, and the squire can do nothing but go along with them. In a program note released with the film, Bergman wrote: ‘‘In my film the crusader returns from the Crusades as the soldier returns from war today. In the Middle Ages men lived in terror of the plague. Today they live in fear of the atomic bomb. The Seventh Seal is an allegory with a theme that is quite simple: man, his eternal search for God, with death as his only certainty.’’ Bergman has turned against this group of films, especially The Virgin Spring whose motivations he now finds ‘‘bogus.’’ With its sparse, stylized, thematic dialogue, its austere sound effects, and its dignified melancholy music, The Seventh Seal survives as a compell- ing, if obsessive film, visually beautiful but permeated by the lighter as well as the darkest aspects of religious experience. It remains a powerful study in the cruelty of the religious impulse once it has soured in the human consciousness and merged with the darker aspects of the psyche. Bergman, at this spiritually troubled time in his life, was concerned with, ‘‘the idea of the Christian God as something destructive and fantastically dangerous, something filled with risk for the human being and bringing out in him the dark destructive forces instead of the opposite.’’ Later, by 1960, he had adopted a more humanist position, and ‘‘life became much easier to live.’’ —Roger Manvell SKUPLIJACI PERJA (I Even Met Happy Gypsies) Yugoslavia, 1968 Director: Alexsandar Petrovic Production: Avala, in association with Prominent; color; running time: 90 minutes. Screenplay: Aleksandar Petrovic, based on the play by Dan Hamp- ton; photography: Tomislav Pinter; editor: Milo Mica; music: Aleksandar Petrovic; art designer: Veljko Despotovic. SKUPLIJACI PERJA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1114 Skuplijaci Perja Cast: Bekim Fehmiu (Bora); Gordana Jovanovic (Tisa); Bata Zivojinovic (Mirta); Olivera Vuco (Lence); Mija Aleksic (Father Pavle); Etelka Filipovski (Bora’s Wife); Milorad Jovanovic (Toni); Milivoje Djordjevic (Sandor); Rahela Ferari (Nun); Severin Bijelic (Religious peasant). *** I Even Met Happy Gypsies is the progenitor of all the Yugo-gypsy movies that came after it, most notably Emir Kusturica’s The Time of the Gypsies and Goran Paskaljevic’s Guardian Angel, neither of which even recapture the raw authenticity of Petrovic’s acutely observed and felt picture. Alexander Petrovic, one of the grand old men of the Yugoslav cinema who died shortly after completing his epic Migrations, enjoyed the only major international success of his career with I Even Met Happy Gypsies, which was nominated for Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1967, as was Petrovic’s Three on the previous year. The film actually picked up the Special Jury Prize in Cannes in 1967. In all of Happy Gypsies, there is not a single happy gypsy—the title is an ironic quote from a traditional tzigane tune. The actors who play the gypsies may be elated now, however, for this Yugoslav movie has been nominated for an Academy Award, and with good reason. Though it is full of flaws and inconsistencies of style, it depicts, with melancholy and muted colour, the odd, anachronistic ways of all-but-forgotten people. On the Pannonian plain near Belgrade, a colony of gypsies dwell in a clot of squalor, surviving on what they earn from buying and selling goose feathers. Outstanding among them is an erotic, intem- perate feather merchant named Bora, played by Bekim Fehmiu, a Yugoslav actor strongly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo. End- lessly indulging in wife-beating and mistress-bedding, Bora downs litres of wine and scatters his seed, his feathers, and his future. As the film’s principal character, he meanders from confined hovels to expansive farm fields, from rural barrooms to the streets of Belgrade. Where ever he travels, he witnesses—and sometimes acts out—the gypsies’ heritage of violence and tragedy, providing the viewer with astonishing glimpses of a rapidly vanishing life. —Mike Downey SMOKEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1115 SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT See SOMMARNATTENS LEENDE SMOKE USA, 1995 Director: Wayne Wang Production: Miramax Film presents an NDF/Euro Space production in association with Peter Newman; color, Panavision; running time: 108 minutes; length: 3180 meters. Released 9 June 1995 in USA. Cost: $7 million. Producers: Greg Johnson, Peter Newman, Hisami Kuriowa, Kenzo Horikoshi, Bob Weinstein (executive), Harvey Weinstein (execu- tive), Satoru Iseki (executive); screenplay: Paul Auster, based on his Smoke short story ‘‘Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story’’; photography: Adam Holender; editor: Maysie Hoy; production design: Kalina Ivanov; music: Rachel Portman. Cast: Harvey Keitel (Auggie Wren); William Hurt (Paul Benjamin); Harold Perrineau (Rashid Cole); Forest Whitaker (Cyrus Cole); Stockard Channing (Ruby); Ashley Judd (Felicity); Michelle Hurst (Aunte Em); Malik Yoba (The Creep). Awards: Silver Bear (Wayne Wang), Berlin International Filmfestival, 1995; Danish Film Critics Bodil Award for Best American Film, 1995; German Film Award for Best Foreign Film, 1995; Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay (Paul Auster), 1995. Publications Scripts: Auster, Paul, Smoke and Blue in the Face: Two Films, preface by Wayne Wang, New York, 1995. SMULTRONST?LLET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1116 Articles: Svendsen, Erik, ‘‘Fort?llingens n?dvendighed,’’ in Kosmorama, no. 213, Autumn 1995. Felperin, Leslie, and Chris Darke, ‘‘Smoke Opera,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), April 1996. Nichols, Hayden Bixby, review in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1998. *** As Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) finally tells Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) his Christmas story, we get the only ultra-close-ups of the film Smoke. We see Auggie’s mouth in ultra-close-up, and the camera then cuts to a corresponding shot of Paul Benjamin’s eyes. As it ends the film thus pays tribute to the spoken word and the moving image: next we see Paul Benjamin writing Auggie’s story, followed by a visual version. Wayne Wang’s film comes alive through its pictures and its many stories, cultivating digression with affection in its superabundance of successful attempts to capture something as volatile as smoke and as weightless as the human soul. The fulcrum of the story is Auggie’s tobacconist’s store and in five chapters, named after the five characters of the story, a series of plots unfold that reflect on one another, interweave with one another, and together become the music of the happiest of chances. The characters all are more than meets the eye. The three men, Auggie, Paul, and Rashid (Harold Perrineau), are everyday people, but artists, too. Paul is an author, but with writer’s block; Rashid sketches; and Auggie turns out to be an artistic soul with the unique photographic project of taking a picture of the same street corner every morning, every day of the year. Auggie has taken 4000 photographs so far, and although Paul thinks they look the same at first, closer examination reveals the rich variety of people, situations, and by no means least, light. This little corner of the universe is replete with stories if one listens properly, and Auggie does so, transforming everyday life into poetry by his almost meditative project. In his photographs people are captured at a specific moment in their own stories, which take place outside the photographs, just as vital parts of the narrative unfurl off- frame and beyond the plot we are following—in the pasts and futures of the characters, for example. The three characters all have stories behind them, problematic pasts. Paul has lost his wife, the tragic victim of a robber’s stray bullet that took her life just outside Auggie’s tobacconist’s store. If only she hadn’t had the exact change, Auggie meditates, it would not have happened. The black lad Rashid, who saves Paul from being run over, has not only many identities but also many stories he uses to conceal his identity. Perhaps the vagueness of his identity is due to the loss of his mother in infancy and the disappearance of his father when he was young. The same may be true of Auggie, who is sought out by a former girlfriend, Ruby, who says he is the father of Felicity, now a pregnant junkie. Felicity’s mother lacks an eye, Rashid’s father an arm; both lack proper relationships with their children. Interwoven with this story is the tale of the $5000 Rashid hid in Paul’s bookcase. The money changes hands several times in the film, ending in Ruby’s possession and disappearing from the plot. We are not told how this story ends any more than we hear who begins to take an interest in Paul’s health or what happens to Rashid and his newly-found father. In this way, too, important parts of the plot are played out after the film ends and the film assumes more and more the character of a cross-section of life than a story, narrated with a light-headed facility like the smoke that has given the film its title. It is the long, inexplicable arm of coincidence that makes the world appear to hang together and which directs its characters towards a resolution of their traumatic pasts. Rashid chances upon the trail of his father, but must be forced by his friends to reveal himself to his father. Auggie has a daughter foisted on him, and Paul learns to reconcile himself to his loss and become a productive author again. Through the examples and support of the others each comes to terms with his thorny past and becomes more complete as a person. Auggie dates and times his photographs, which he asks Paul to take the time to examine properly. We must take our time over the film, too, and watch it carefully: running across the chapter divisions, which may seem somewhat random, is a wealth of nuances and facets of technique so peculiar to screenplay author Paul Auster that Smoke urges itself upon us as actually being his film. Yet it is the director, Wayne Wang, who has imbued it with the pleasure and intangibility of smoke. Smoke is a tangible, intense narrative in words and pictures, perhaps a fairy tale played out in the same time frame as Auggie’s Christmas story: from summer to Christmas. If so it is a fairy tale full of little stories from one corner of the universe, a film that opens our eyes to the wonderful variety of the world and the music of chance. —Dan Nissen SMULTRONST?LLET (Wild Strawberries) Sweden, 1957 Director: Ingmar Bergman Production: Svensk Filmindustri; black and white, 35mm; running time: 90 minutes; length: 2,490 meters. Released 26 December 1957. Filmed summer 1957 in Svensk studios and backlots in Rosunda, some exteriors shot in and around Stockholm. Producer: Allan Ekelund; screenplay: Ingmar Bergman; photogra- phy: Gunnar Fischer; editor: Oscar Rosander; sound: Aaby Wedin and Lennart Wallin; art director: Gittan Gustafsson; music: Erik Nordgren; costume designer: Millie Str?m. Cast: Victor Sj?str?m (Professor Isak Borg); Bibi Andersson (Sara); Ingrid Thulin (Marianne); Gunnar Bj?rnstrand (Evald); Jullan Kindahl (Agda); Folke Sundquist (Anders); Bj?rn Bjelvenstam (Viktor); Naima Wifstrand (Isak’s mother); Gunnel Brostr?m (Mrs. Alman); Gertrud Fridh (Isak’s wife); Ake Fridell (Her lover); Sif Rund (Aunt); Max von Sydow (?kerman); Yngve Nordwall (Uncle Aron); Per Sj?strand (Sigfrid); Gio Petré (Sigbritt); Gunnel Lindblom (Charlotta); Maud Hansson (Angelica); Anne-Marie Wiman (Mrs. ?kerman); Eva Norée (Anna); Monica Ehrling (The twins). SMULTRONST?LLETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1117 Smultronst?llet Publications Script: Bergman, Ingmar, Wild Strawberries, in Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1960; also published separately, London and New York, 1970. Books: Béranger, Jean, Ingmar Bergman et ses films, Paris, 1959. H??k, Marianne, Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1962. Chiaretti, Tommaso, Ingmar Bergman, Rome, 1964. Donner, J?rn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Blooming- ton, Indiana, 1964. Nelson, David, Ingmar Bergman: The Search for God, Boston, 1964. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1968. Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Wood, Robin, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Sj?gren, Henrik, Regi: Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1970. Young, Vernon, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, New York, 1971. Bj?rkman, Stig, and others, editors, Bergman on Bergman, New York, 1973. Ranieri, Tino, Ingmar Bergman, Florence, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart, editor, Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1975. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Ingmar Bergman and Society, San Diego, 1978. Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and the First-Person Film, Princeton, 1978. Marion, Denis, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1979. Manvell, Roger, Ingmar Bergman: An Appreciation, New York, 1980. Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, Bos- ton, 1981. Petric, Vlada, editor, Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, New York, 1981. Cowie, Peter, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York, 1982. Livingston, Paisley, Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1982. SMULTRONST?LLET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1118 Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Jones, William G., editor, Talking with Bergman, Dallas, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1983. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham, North Carolina, 1986. Bergman, Ingmar, Laterna Magica, Stockholm, 1987; as The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, London, 1988. Cohen, James, Through a Lens Darkly, New York, 1991. Bjorkman, Stig, and Torsten Maans, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Cambridge, 1993. Cohen, Hubert I., Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York, 1993. Long, Robert Emmet, Ingmar Bergman: Film & Stage, New York, 1994. Tornqvist, Egil, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam, 1995. Blackwell, Marilyn J., Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Rochester, 1997. Michaels, Lloyd, editor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, New York, 1999; revised edition, Cambridge, 2000. Articles: Films and Filming (London), October 1958. Dyer, Peter John, in Films and Filming (London), December 1958. Cavender, Kenneth, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1958–59. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘An Aspect of Bergman,’’ in Film (London), March-April 1959. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), April 1959. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 1 July 1959. Archer, Eugene, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1959. McCann, Eleanor, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Wild Strawberries,” in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. Blackwood, Caroline, ‘‘The Mystique of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Encounter (London), April 1961. Durgnat, Raymond, and Ian Johnson, ‘‘Puritans Anonymous,’’ in Motion (London), Autumn 1963. Steene, Birgitta, in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1965. Scott, James, ‘‘The Achievement of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), Winter 1965. Comstock, W. Richard, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman: An Assessment at Mid- Point,’’ in Film Society Review (New York), April 1966. Greenberg, H. R., in American Image, Spring 1970. Steene, Birgitta, ‘‘Images and Words in Ingmar Bergman’s Films,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1970. Welsh, James, in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1971. Tulloch, J., ‘‘Images of Dying and the Artistic Role: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries,’’ in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), March 1977. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), October 1978. Eberwein, Robert T., ‘‘The Filmic Dream and Point of View,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1980. Casebier, Allan, ‘‘Reductionism without Discontent: The Case of Wild Strawberries and Persona,” in Film Psychology Review (New York), Winter-Spring 1980. ‘‘Smultronst?llet Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1984. Andersson, L. G., ‘‘Smultronst?llet och homo viator-motivet,’’ in Filmhaftet (Uppsala, Sweden), May 1988. Trasatti, S., ‘‘Bergman, il paradosso di un ‘Ateo cristiano,’’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), November-December 1991. Clark, John, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 6, no. 1, September 1992. Lansing Smith, Evans, ‘‘Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau, and Bergman,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 3, 1996. Lucas, Tim, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 34, 1996. Bouda, Marek, ‘‘Film a sen,’’ in Film a Doba (Prague), vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 1998. *** Wild Strawberries is to Ingmar Bergman what King Lear was to Shakespeare—a study in old age and the need for an old man to discover the errors and inhumane deeds of his life and, as he cannot mend them, come to terms with his own fallibility. Lear (‘‘four score and upward’’) learns the truth about himself by passing through a violent period of deprivation and madness, occasioned by the cruelty of his two married daughters. Professor Isak Borg (played by Victor Sj?str?m in his late 70s) is an honored physician, and he learns his home-truths through a succession of dreams experienced during a drive by car to Lund, where he is to receive yet another academic honor. He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Marianne, who is estranged from her husband, Isak’s son. She is quite unafraid of Isak, prompting in him the self-examination that the dreams, forming the principal action of the film, represent. Like Lear, Isak Borg emerges purged, if not wholly changed, from the subconscious confrontations with self-truth. Much of the film he narrates himself as part of the self- examination, as if under some form of analysis. The concept of the film was influenced by Strindberg’s Dream Play, which Bergman had directed for the theater. The title, Wild Strawberries, refers to the fruit that symbolizes for the Swedish the emergence of spring, the rebirth of life. The motif of wild strawberries frequently recurs in Bergman’s films. Isak Borg is revealed as a cold-natured, egotistical, irascible and authoritarian old man, even though the journey should be a time of happiness for him in terms of academic recognition. The most macabre of the dreams comes before the journey has even begun; it is a dream Bergman claims frequently to have had himself, that of seeing a coffin fall free into the street from a driverless hearse and then breaking open. In the film a hand emerges from the coffin and grasps Isak; he finds the face of the corpse to be his own. During the journey by car, Marianne is very blunt with her father- in-law, whose cold nature and lack of humanity match that of his son. The professor dozes as the car rides along the country highway. A succession of dreams reveals to him the shortcomings and losses of his youth. On the journey they pass the now empty house among the birchwoods where, in distant years, Isak had spent his youth. He dreams of the loss of the girl he had loved but was afraid to kiss, his cousin Sara, who picked wild strawberries for him to share with her during their failing courtship. He eventually loses her to his more ardent brother, Sigfrid. Another stop is made for the professor to see his 96-year-old mother. ‘‘We imagined her,’’ says Bergman, ‘‘to be somewhere between 90 and 100—almost mythical.’’ Marianne con- siders her to be ‘‘ice-cold, in some ways more frightening than death itself’’; Isak, then, is the product of a cold womb. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1119 Sara is re-incarnated as a student who, hitchhiking with a couple of young men, is offered a lift by the professor and his daughter-in-law. The presence of this double excites Isak to dream of the youthful Sarah who shows him his now-aged face in a mirror, for in his dreams he remains his present age, while those from his past are seen as they were when they were young. When he begs her not leave him this time, he finds himself voiceless. She can no longer hear him. Though she leaves him for his brother, her seducer, in a later dream she takes him by the hand and shows him the joy of happy parenthood. The professor’s final dream is at once the most revealing and the most tormenting. Like a young student, he faces a humiliating oral examination which is somewhat like a trial. Those who have been most intimate with him are witnesses. He can make no sense of what is asked of him; even the female cadaver he is called upon to examine, rises and laughs in his face. He is forced to be the witness concerning his dead wife’s unfaithfulness with her sensual, middle-aged lover, and to hear her bitter description of him as ‘‘completely cold and hypocritical.’’ (There is a melancholy burlesque of this ill-fated marriage in the behavior of a bickering couple from an earlier scene.) At the conclusion of this trial-examination, Isak is condemned by the judge-examiner and sentenced to a punishment of loneliness. When he wakes, Marianne reveals she is pregnant and determined to go back to her husband, insisting on her right to have the child he, as the father, does not want her to have. Wild Strawberries, for all the horror of certain moments, is a film full of compassionate understanding and the need for warmth and humanity. There is a compassion for this old man who cannot respond to people and who lacks the important quality of love and concern for others, particularly for women. Yet there is humor, even touches of light-heartedness, in the film, particularly in the scenes with the students and those between Isak and his aged housekeeper, who proves his match when it comes to mutual criticism. It is indeed this overall compassion that makes Wild Strawberries so memorable, crowned by the magisterial performance of Victor Sj?str?m, the pioneer Swedish film director. —Roger Manvell SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS USA, 1937 Supervising Director: David Hand Production: Walt Disney Studios; Technicolor, 35mm, animation; running time: 83 minutes. Released 4 February 1938, but premiered in December 1937, released through RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Re- released 1943, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1975, 1983. Filmed in Walt Disney Studios. Cost: $1,500,000. Producer: Walt Disney; screenplay: Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Dick Richard, Merrill de Maris and Webb Smith, from the fairy tale ‘‘Snow White’’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from Grimm’s Fairy Tales; sequence directors: Perce Pearce, Larry Morey, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, and Ben Sharpsteen; art directors: Charles Phillippi, Hugh Gennesy, Terrell Stapp, McLaren Stewart, Harold Miles, Tom Codrick, Gustaf Tenggren, Kenneth Anderson, Kendall O’Connor, and Hazel Sewell; music: Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline, Paul Smith, and Larry Morey; character designers: Albert Hunter and Jo Grant; supervising animators: Hamilton Luske, Vladamir Tytla, Fred Moore, and Norman Fergu- son; animators: Frank Thomas, Dick Lundy, Arthur Babbitt, Eric Larson, Milton Kahl, Robert Stokes, James Algar, Al Eugster, Cy Young, Joshua Meador, Ugo D’Orsi, George Rowley, Les Clark, Fred Spencer, Bill Roberts, Bernard Garbutt, Grim Natwick, Jack Campbell, Marvin Woodward, James Culhane, Stan Quackenbush, Ward Kimball, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Robert Martsch; back- grounds: Samuel Armstrong, Mique Nelson, Merle Cox, Claude Coats, Phil Dike, Ray Lockrem, and Maurice Noble. Cast: Voices: Adriana Caselotti (Snow White); Harry Stockwell (Prince Charming); Lucille LaVerne (The Queen); Moroni Olsen (Magic Mirror); Billy Gilbert (Sneezy); Pinto Colvig (Sleepy and Grumpy); Otis Harlan (Happy); Scotty Mattraw (Bashful); Roy Atwell (Doc); Stuart Buchanan (Humbert, the Queen’s huntsman); Marion Darlington (Bird sounds and warbling); The Fraunfelder Family (Yodeling). Awards: Oscar, Special Award to Walt Disney, 1938; Venice Film Festival, Great Art Trophy, 1938; New York Film Critics Award, Special Award, 1938. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1120 Publications Books: Field, Robert D., The Art of Walt Disney, New York, 1942. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Sense, edited by Jay Leyda, New York, 1942. Miller, Diane Disney, The Story of Walt Disney, edited by Pete Martin, New York, 1957. Stephenson, Ralph, Animation in the Cinema, New York, 1967. Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney, New York, 1968; revised edition, London, 1986. Bessy, Maurice, Walt Disney, Paris, 1970. Kurland, Gerald, Walt Disney, The Master of Animation, Charlottes- ville, Virginia, 1971. Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney, from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms, New York, 1973; revised edition, 1999. Maltin, Leonard, The Disney Films, New York, 1973; revised edition, 1984; 2000. Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney: An American Original, New York, 1976. Edera, Bruno, Full Length Animated Features, edited by John Halas, New York, 1977. Leebron, Elizabeth, and Lynn Gartley, Walt Disney: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Peary, Gerald and Danny, editors, The American Animated Cartoon, New York, 1980. Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, New York, 1982; revised edition, 1999. Bruno, Eduardo, and Enrico Ghezzi, Walt Disney, Venice, 1985. Mosley, Leonard, Disney’s World: A Biography, New York, 1985; as The Real Walt Disney, London, 1986. Culhane, Shamus, Talking Animals and Other People, New York, 1986. Grant, John, Encyclopaedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, New York, 1987; revised edition, 1998. Holliss, Richard, and Brian Sibley, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Making of the Classic Film, London, 1987; revised edition 1994. Krause, Martin F., and Linda Witkowski, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: An Art in Its Making Featuring the Collection of Stephen H. Ison, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1994. Thomas, Bob, Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empire, New York, 1998. Smith, Dave, Disney A to Z: The Updated Official Encyclopedia, New York, 1999. Solomon, Charles, The Art of Disney, New York, 2000. Articles: Ferguson, Otis, in Life (New York), 13 December 1937. Variety (New York), 29 December 1937. Boone, Andrew, in Popular Science Monthly (New York), Janu- ary 1938. New York Times, 14 January 1938. Spectator (London), 4 March 1938. Grauer, G. W., ‘‘The Snow White Debate Continues,’’ in Christian Century (Chicago), August 1938. La Farge, Christopher, ‘‘Walt Disney and the Art Form,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), September 1941. MacGowan, Kenneth, in Hollywood Quarterly, no.1, 1945. ‘‘A Wonderful World: Growing Impact of the Disney World,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 18 April 1955. Panofsky, Erwin, in Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot, New York, 1959. Sadoul, Georges, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1962. Brewer, Roy, ‘‘Walt Disney, R.I.P.,’’ in National Review (New York), 10 January 1967. Poncet, Marie-Therese, ‘‘Walt Disney de Mickey à Disneyland,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 2, Paris, 1968. Village Voice (New York), 2 August 1973. Cassian, N., in Cinema (Bucharest), September 1973. Sorel, S., in Téléciné (Paris), December 1973-January 1974. Brody, M., ‘‘The Wonderful World of Disney: Its Psychological Appeal,’’ in American Image (Detroit), no. 4, 1976. Paul, William, ‘‘Art, Music, Nature, and Walt Disney,’’ in Movie (London), Spring 1977. Culhane, John, ‘‘The Last of the Old Nine Men,’’ in American Film (Washington, DC), June 1977. Canemaker, J., ‘‘Disney Animation: History and Technique,’’ in Film News (New York), January-February 1979. Canemaker, J., ‘‘Disney Design 1928–1979,’’ in Millimeter (New York), February 1979. Gomiscek, T., in Ekran (Ljubljana), nos. 5–6, 1979. Kinney, Nancy S., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Hulsens, E., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), April 1984. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 3, 1989. Hawkins, Harriet, ‘‘The Wonderful World of Carl Jung,’’ in Modern Review, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1992. Holusha, J., ‘‘Snow White Is Made Over Frame by Frame and Byte by Byte,’’ in New York Times, vol. 142, D5, 30 June 1993. Harmetz, Aljean, ‘‘Disney’s ‘Old Men’ Savor the Vintage Years,’’ in New York Times, 4 July 1993. Kennedy, L., in Village Voice (New York), vol. 38, 13 July 1993. ‘‘Snow White Is Fairest of All, Thanks to Digital Makeover,’’ in Film Journal (New York), vol. 96, August 1993. Fisher, Bob, ‘‘Off to Work We Go: The Digital Restoration of Snow White,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 74, no. 9, September 1993. Care, R., ‘‘Record Track,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 12, Fall 1993. Care, Ross, and others, ‘‘Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / Pinocchio,’’ in Cue Sheet (Hollywood), vol. 10, no. 1–2, Spring 1993–1994. Felperin Sharman, Leslie, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 8, August 1994. Catsos, G., ‘‘Disney’s Folly!’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 48, Janu- ary/February 1995. Nesbet, Anne, ‘‘Inanimations: Snow White and Ivan the Terrible,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 50, no. 4, Summer 1997. Wright, Terri Martin, ‘‘Romancing the Tale: Walt Disney’s Adapta- tion of the Grimm’s Snow White,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 1997. *** In his years as an animator, director, producer, and magnate, Walt Disney did more than any other individual to influence and shape the look of animated films. As a pioneer he was willing to take risks by experimenting with various technical inventions. In almost every case SODOM UND GOMORRHAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1121 these experiments were successful. By searching for new and differ- ent ways to expand and advance the cartoon format, Walt Disney kept several steps ahead of his competitors. His animated films became the technological standard of the industry and no one came close to matching them. Among Disney’s most innovative films is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the first feature-length animated cartoons. Part of his reason for venturing into the feature film market was economic. Although Disney’s eight-minute cartoons were among the most popular of their day, these shorts had a limited earning potential. Cartoons were only a secondary attraction at the movie theaters and did not receive top billing or top dollar. With accelerating production costs, Disney realized that it would soon become more and more difficult to turn a profit. Looking ahead to the future, he saw feature film production as a way to keep his studio in the black. The production of his first feature-length cartoon proved to be an enormous undertaking. Many of Disney’s competitors felt that the task was impossible and news spread throughout the trade papers about ‘‘Disney’s Folly.’’ By his own admission Disney was not totally aware of all the complexities that would accompany his new project. He viewed the film as a learning experience and tackled each obstacle with undaunted perseverance. Disney soon discovered that the scope of a feature-length cartoon dictated some technical changes from the shorter length format. For example, the field size (the size of the painted cels) would have to be enlarged to make room for more detail. This not only required the manufacture of larger cels, but also new drawing boards. In addition, the animation cameras had to be adjusted to photograph the larger field size. Another innovation used was the multi-plane camera. Actually, Disney’s multi-plane camera was first used to a small extent in a short cartoon called The Old Mill. The ability of this tool to enhance a feeling of depth proved more useful in Disney’s features. With conventional flat animation cels it is difficult to simulate a dolly or a pan. For example, when a camera dollys in on a flat animation cel, all the objects in the scene appear to grow larger at the same rate, whereas in reality the foreground would grow much quicker while the background objects would stay relatively the same size. Since the multi-plane camera holds the foreground and background cels on different planes, it is possible to manipulate the images on each cel at different speeds. Disney’s first multi-plane camera was fourteen feet tall with seven different levels, all of which could be controlled independently of each other. With the expansion of the screen time for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney also had to expand the number of employees in his company. Approximately 750 artists worked on the two million drawings that made up the film. These artists worked in an assembly- line fashion, each group responsible for a specific task. Some artists worked on the layout, others on background, some worked as in- betweeners for the chief animators, and other artists were inkers and painters. One group worked in special effects animation. In the past, cartoon animators had paid little attention to special effects. However, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs contains many examples of effects animation in the representation of lighting, smoke, rain, and other details. Snow White was also different from other cartoons in that some of the characters were human. Most cartoons feature animals, and although they had anthropomorphic traits, they were all removed from the actual world. The characters of the Queen, Prince, Snow White, and the Huntsman presented a special problem in their ‘‘realism.’’ To help keep the animation natural, live-action reference footage was shot of actors as a rotoscope (where the animation is traced directly off the live-action film), but mainly as a guide for the animators to follow. After three years in the making, Snow White was finally ready for a Christmas release in 1937. The film was an instant success and received nothing less than glowing reviews. During its initial release the film grossed over $8 million and it continues to be a financial success with each subsequent re-issue. ‘‘Disney’s Folly’’ proved to be the way of the future and feature-length animated films continue to be made today, long after the eight-minute theatrical cartoon format has died out. Once again, Walt Disney was proven to be a most important innovator and promoter of the art of animation. —Linda J. Obalil SODOM UND GOMORRHA (Die Legende von Sünde und Strafe; The Queen of Sin and the Spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrah) Austria, 1922 Director: Michael Kertész (later Michael Curtiz) Production: Sascha-Filmindustrie AG, Vienna; black and white, 35 mm, partly colored. Originally in two parts: Part I, 2,100 meters, prologue and four acts; Part II, 1800 meters, 6 acts. Reconstruction by Josef Gloger, Filmarchiv Austria, in 6 reels, length: 3,253.7 meters; running time: 150 minutes. Released 13 October 1922 (Part I: Die Sünde) and 20 October 1922 (Part II: Die Strafe) in Vienna; released in Berlin, Germany, 15 August 1923. Filmed 1921/22 in Laaerberg, Vienna, in the city of Vienna, at Sch?nbrunn, at Hermesvilla in Vienna, Laxenburg near Vienna, and Erzberg in Styria. Producer: Count Alexander Kolowrat; screenplay: Ladislaus Vajda, Michael Kertész; photography: Gustav Ucicky; art directors: Jul- ius von Borsody (chief architect), Hans Rouc, Stephan Wessely; costume design: Remigius Geyling; music arrangement: Giuseppe Becce. Cast: Lucy Doraine (Miss Mary Conway; Sarah, Lot’s wife; Lia, Queen of Syria); Erika Wagner (Mrs. Agathe Conway); Georg Reimers (Mr. Jackson Harber, banker); Walter Slezak (Eduard Harber; student; gold smith in Galilea); Michael Varkonyi (Angel; priest); Kurt Ehrle (Harry Lighton); thousands of extras (some sources say 3000, others 14,000), including Willi Forst, Paula Wessely, Hans Thimig, and Béla Balázs. Publications Books: Gottlein, Arthur, Der ?sterreichische Film. Ein Bilderbuch, Vienna, 1976. Fritz, Walter, and G?tz Lachmann, editors, Sodom und Gomorrha— Die Legende von Sünde und Strafe, Vienna, 1988. SOME LIKE IT HOT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1122 Pluch, Barbara, Der ?sterreichische Monumentalstummfilm—Ein Beitrag zur Filmgeschichte der zwanziger Jahre, Master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 1989. Fritz, Walter, Im Kino erlebe ich die Welt. 100 Jahre Kino und Film in ?sterreich, Vienna, 1997. Articles: Krenn, Günter, ‘‘Sodom und Gomorrha 96—Die unendliche Geschichte einer Rekonstruktion,’’ in ?sterreichisches Filmarchiv Jahrbuch, Vienna, 1996. Büttner, Elisabeth, and Christian Dewald, ‘‘Michael Kertész. Filmarbeit in ?sterreich bzw. bei der Sascha-Filmindustrie A.-G., Wien, 1919–1926,’’ in Elektrische Schatten. Beitr?ge zur ?sterreichischen Stummfilmgeschichte, edited by Francesco Bono, Paolo Caneppele, and Günter Krenn, Vienna, 1999. *** Sodom und Gomorrha remained a near mythical film for many decades. Only a few fragments of the most grandiose film, not only of producer Sascha Kolowrat, but also of the Austrian silent film era, were available to film historians. The present copy, restored by the Filmarchiv Austria, presents a substantial portion of the original film with missing scenes replaced by intertextual commentaries to main- tain the narrative flow. The demise of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918 forced the enterprising Kolowrat to look for new business strategies and markets for his Sascha-Film industrie, the largest film company in Austria. On a trip to New York in 1919/20, where he set up the Herz Film Corporation as an American distribution outlet, he was inspired by D.W. Griffiths’s Intolerance (1916) to create his own spectaculars. For the biggest project, Sodom and Gomorrha, he assigned the direction to Michael Kertész, a Hungarian director with great organi- zational skills who had fled to Vienna for political reasons, but also because Budapest had become too small for his aspirations. Eventu- ally he also outgrew Vienna and responded to an offer from Holly- wood, where he became famous as Michael Curtiz. He co-wrote the script with his fellow Hungarian Ladislaus Vajda. The director’s then wife, Lucy Doraine, played the leading role; soon after the film was completed they were divorced. The son was played by Walter Slezak, who also moved to Hollywod. Other members of the crew went on to fame. Julius von Borsody became a highly regarded set designer for many decades in Austrian film. The cameramen were Gustav Ucicky, who worked as a director in Germany in the 1930s and from 1938 to 1945 at Wien-Film, and Franz Planer, who became a highly successful cinematographer in Hollywood. In short, the film was a concentration of young talents who later made their mark in Hollywood or Austria; among the crowd of extras were also the future stars Paula Wessely and Willi Forst. The film opens at the London stock exchange, showing Harber as a ruthless capitalist. He wants to marry Mary Conway, the daughter of his former lover. The young girl does not love him, but both she and her mother want the life of luxury he can provide. She rejects her true love, the sculptor, who tries to commit suicide. Mary’s personality has changed: she flirts with Harber’s son Eduard and tries to seduce his teacher, a priest. To present her altered character, the first of the symbolic acts shows Mary as the cruel Queen of Syria, capable of ordering the execution of a young jeweller (played by the same actor as Eduard), who has tried to help her. The action returns to the present with Eduard and his father planning to meet Mary in the garden pavillon. Before they arrive, Mary falls asleep and dreams that Eduard kills his father in a fight over her. She now suddenly finds herself in biblical Sodom as Lot’s wife, who serves the love goddess Astarte. The film revels in lavish orgiastic scenes until God destroys the town in punishment. Mary, denounced by the priest, is being led out for execution, when the horror of the situation awakens her from her nightmare. Purified in spirit she recognizes that a loveless marriage for money and her flirtatious behaviour will end in disaster. She returns to the sculptor Harry and a moral life. With its elaborate structure—a frame story with a plot within a plot—there is no doubt that Sodom und Gomorrha is confusing. Kolowrat and Kertész were clearly striving for sensationalism with the enormous cast, the daring (for their time) orgy scenes, and the cruel, shameless, seductive behavior of Mary. Today the mass scenes border at times on the unintendedly comic, showing as they do hundreds of people moving around aimlessly waving their arms or palm fronds. Remarkable are Lucy Doraine’s extravagant contempo- rary gowns, sexy historical skimpy dresses, and bizarre head wear in the biblical flashback, all created by Remigius Geyling, head set designer at the Vienna Burgtheater. Lucy Doraine plays the roles of Mary Conway, Lot’s wife and the Queen of Syria. The imposing buildings in the film, with the temple of Sodom as the centerpiece, were erected in the south of Vienna on Laaerberg; the studio in Sievering was much too small for such grandiose sets. In this time of economic depression the film offered work for many of the area’s unemployed, including technicians, painters, carpenters, hair- dressers, sculptors, and extras. While the film cannot be considered a cinematic masterpiece, it commands admiration as the grandest monumental film of the Austrian silent film era and an important milestone in filmmaking. —Gertraud Steiner Daviau SOME LIKE IT HOT USA, 1959 Director: Billy Wilder Production: Ashton Productions and the Mirisch Company; black and white, 35mm; running time: 120 minutes. Released 1959 by United Artists. Producers: Billy Wilder with Doane Harrison and I. A. L. Diamond; screenplay: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, from an unpublished story by R. Thoeren and M. Logan; photography: Charles Lang; editor: Arthur Schmidt; sound: Fred Lau; art director: Ted Haworth; music: Adolph Deutsch; costume designer: Orry-Kelly. Cast: Marilyn Monroe (Sugar Kane); Tony Curtis (Joe/Josephine); Jack Lemmon (Jerry/Daphne); George Raft (Spats Colombo); Pat SOME LIKE IT HOTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1123 Some Like It Hot O’Brien (Mulligan); Joe E. Brown (Osgood Fielding III); Nehemiah Persoff (Little Bonaparte); John Shawlee (Sweet Sue); Billy Gray (Sig Poliakoff); George Stone (Toothpick); Dave Barry (Beinstock); Mike Mazurki and Harry Wilson (Spats’s henchmen); Beverly Wills (Dolores); Barbara Drew (Nellie); Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Para- dise); Tom Kennedy (Bouncer); John Indrisano (Walter). Award: Oscar for Costume Design-Black and White, 1959. Publications Script: Wilder, Billy, and I. A. L. Diamond, Some Like It Hot: A Screenplay, New York, 1959. Books: Conway, Michael, and Mark Ricci, editors, The Films of Marilyn Monroe, New York, 1964. Madsen, Axel, Billy Wilder, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969. Wood, Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily, New York, 1970. Kobal, John, Marilyn Monroe: A Life on Film, New York, 1974. Widenen, Don, Lemmon: A Biography, New York, 1975. Parish, James R., and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Baltake, Joe, The Films of Jack Lemmon, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1977; revised edition, 1987. Seidman, Steve, The Film Career of Billy Wilder, Boston, 1977. Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, New York, 1977; reprinted, 1988. Dick, Bernard F., Billy Wilder, Boston, 1980; revised edition, Cam- bridge, 1996. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Freedland, Michael, Jack Lemmon, London, 1985. Summers, Anthony, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, London, 1985. Rollyson, Carl E., Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1986. Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Lon- don, 1987. Jacob, Jerome, Billy Wilder, Paris, 1988. Seidl, Claudius, Billy Wilder: Seine Filme, sein Leben, Munich, 1988. Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder, New York, 1996. Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, New York, 1998. Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder, New York, 1999. Leaming, Barbara, Marilyn Monroe, New York, 2000. Articles: Life (New York), 20 April 1959. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Eye of a Cynic,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1960. Schumach, Murray, ‘‘The Wilder—and Funnier—Touch,’’ in New York Times Magazine, 24 January 1960. Lemmon, Jack, ‘‘Such Fun to Be Funny,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1960. Roman, Robert, ‘‘Marilyn Monroe,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1962. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Cast a Cold: The Films of Billy Wilder,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1963. ‘‘The Films of Billy Wilder,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965. Mundy, Robert, and Michael Wallington, ‘‘Interview with I. A. L. Diamond,’’ in Cinema (London), October 1969. Baltake, Joe, ‘‘Jack Lemmon,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1970. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, ‘‘The Private Life of Billy Wilder,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1970. Farber, Stephen, ‘‘The Films of Billy Wilder,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1971. Froug, William, ‘‘Interview with I. A. L. Diamond,’’ in The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter, New York, 1972. Kaufmann, Stanley, in Horizon (Los Angeles), Winter 1973. ‘‘Dialogue on Film: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond,’’ in American Film (Washington, DC), July-August 1976. Broeske, Pat H., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. ‘‘Billy Wilder Issue’’ of Filmcritica (Rome), November-Decem- ber 1982. SOMMARNATTENS LEENDE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1124 Frank, Sam, ‘‘I. A. L. Diamond,’’ in American Screenwriters, edited by Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark, Detroit, 1984. Cinema Novo (Porto), May-August 1984. Buckley, M., ‘‘Jack Lemmon,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1984 and January and February 1985. Columbus, C., ‘‘Wilder Times,’’ in American Film (Washington, DC), March 1986. Palmer, J., ‘‘Enunciation and Comedy: Kind Hearts and Coronets,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 30, no. 1/2, 1989. Hommel, Michel, ‘‘Woman’s Director,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), no. 176, February-March 1991. Cohan, S., ‘‘Cary Grant in the Fifties: Indiscretions of the Bachelor’s Masquerade,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 33, no. 4, 1992. Straayer, C., ‘‘Redressing the ‘Natural’: The Temporary Transvestite Film,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), no. 1, 1992. Wilmington, Michael, ‘‘Saint Jack,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 29, no. 2, March-April 1993. Thomson, D., ‘‘Ten Movies That Showed Hollywood How to Live,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 8, July 1997. Premiere (Boulder), vol. 11, February 1998. Rothman, Cliff, ‘‘A 40-Year-Old Comedy That Hasn’t Grown Stale,’’ in The New York Times, section 2, AR24, 1 August 1999. *** If there is a candidate for the funniest closing line in cinema history, it must surely be Osgood’s declaration ‘‘Nobody’s perfect!’’ at the end of Billy Wilder’s spoof on sexual role playing, Some Like It Hot. Utterly unshakeable in his love for Daphne and trusting of his passionate instincts, Osgood overlooks all, including gender. Men masquerading as women have been the source of great comic scenes and characters throughout the history of entertainment, whether the sexual identity beneath the garments and makeup was straight or gay. Until recently, men in women’s clothes have found acceptance on the screen only when their sexual identity was either ambiguous or categorically heterosexual: dressing up was only an extension of the act of performance. While sexual politics were not the focus of Wilder and Diamond’s script, audiences were left with a closing line which was a non-resolution of the issue at hand. Of the two men whose lives were saved by dressing as women, one found love by maintaining that persona: Jerry’s acceptance of Osgood’s proposal was the best single example of l’amour fou since Bu?uel. Many years later Hollywood is still putting straight men in dresses and then confirming their heterosexuality (albeit with a greater understanding of what it means to be a woman, as in Tootsie.) While many of the comic scenes from Some Like it Hot revolve around a spoof of the gangster era (the film begins in Chicago in 1929 with Joe and Jerry witnessing a Valentine’s Day-like massacre) and its screen incarnations (George Raft parodies his coin flip from Scarface), much of the best comedy results from an examination of sexual identity. In the beginning of the film, the all-girl band which Jerry and Joe have joined is bedding down for the night in their train berths. Having erased their masculinity to avoid being erased by gangsters, Joe and Jerry (now Josephine and Daphne) participate in an evening of ‘‘berth rights.’’ When Joe tries to assert his masculinity with Sugar, Jerry insists he maintain his female identity. Aware of their dilemma, our pleasure becomes dependent on the ramifications of gender identification and sexual exposure. In the course of the film Joe re-asserts his masculinity and finds love with Sugar while Jerry pursues his femininity and finds love with Osgood. Legendary in Hollywood for the trouble Marilyn Monroe caused Wilder on the set, the film was a great commercial success and escalated Wilder’s position in Hollywood. His esteem hit its peak with his next release, The Apartment. These two films signalled the beginning of one of the most successful director/actor teams in the history of American cinema. Until 1959 Jack Lemmon had been a talent in search of expansion; with Wilder he unleashed his neurotic mannerisms and became the director’s favourite performer, appear- ing in seven Wilder films. With Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder and his writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond, combined the physicality of the Mack Sennett era with the wit and complications of 1930s screwball comedy to make the funniest American film of the 1950s and one of the greatest of the genre. —Doug Tomlinson SOMETHING IN BETWEEN See NESTO IZMEDJU SOMMARNATTENS LEENDE (Smiles of a Summer Night) Sweden, 1955 Director: Ingmar Bergman Production: Svensk Filmindustri; black and white, 35mm, running time: 108 minutes; length: 2,975 meters. Released 26 December 1955. Filmed Summer 1955 in Svensk studios in R?sunda, exteriors shot in small towns such as Malm? and Ystad. Cost: Bergman states $75,000, other sources claim up to $150,000. Producer: Allan Ekelund; screenplay: Ingmar Bergman; photogra- phy: Gunnar Fischer; editor: Oscar Rosander; sound: P. O. Petterson; art director: P. A. Lundgren; music: Erik Nordgren; costume designer: Mago. Cast: Ulla Jacobsson (Anne Egerman); Eva Dahlbeck (Desirée Armfeldt); Margit Carlquist (Charlotte Malcolm); Harriet Andersson (Petra, the maid); Gunnar Bj?rnstrand (Fredrik Egerman); Jarl Kulle (Count Malcolm); Ake Fridell (Frid, the groom); Bj?rn Bjelvenstam (Henrik Egerman); Naima Wifstrand (Mrs. Armfeldt); Gull Natorp (Malla, Desirée’s maid); Birgitta Valberg and Bibi Andersson (Ac- tresses); Anders Wulff (Desirée’s son); Gunnar Nielsen (Niklas); G?sta Prüzelius (Footman); Svea Holst (Dresser); Hans Straat (Almgen, SOMMARNATTENS LEENDEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1125 Sommarnattens leende the photographer); Lisa Lundholm (Mrs. Almgren); Sigge Fürst (Policeman). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Special Prize for Most Poetic Hu- mor, 1956. Publications Script: Bergman, Ingmar, Smiles of a Summer Night, in Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1960. Books: Béranger, Jean, Ingmar Bergman et ses films, Paris, 1959. H??k, Marianne, Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1962. Chiaretti, Tommaso, Ingmar Bergman, Rome, 1964. Donner, J?rn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Blooming- ton, Indiana, 1964. Nelson, David, Ingmar Bergman: The Search for God, Boston, 1964. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1968. Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Wood, Robin, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Sj?gren, Henrik, Regi: Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1970. Young, Vernon, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, New York, 1971. Bj?rkman, Stig, and others, editors, Bergman on Bergman, New York, 1973. Ranieri, Tino, Ingmar Bergman, Florence, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart M., editor, Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1975. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Ingmar Bergman and Society, San Diego, 1978. Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and the First-Person Film, Princeton, 1978. Marion, Denis, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1979. Manvell, Roger, Ingmar Bergman: An Appreciation, New York, 1980. Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, Bos- ton, 1981. SOMMARNATTENS LEENDE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1126 Petric, Vlada, editor, Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, New York, 1981. Cowie, Peter, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York, 1982. Livingston, Paisley, Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1982. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Jones, William G., editor, Talking with Bergman, Dallas, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1983. Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham, North Carolina, 1986. Bergman, Ingmar, Laterna Magica, Stockholm, 1987; as The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, London, 1988. Cohen, James, Through a Lens Darkly, New York, 1991. Bjorkman, Stig, and Torsten Maans, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Cambridge, 1993. Cohen, Hubert I., Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York, 1993. Long, Robert Emmet, Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage, New York, 1994. Tornqvist, Egil, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam, 1995. Blackwell, Marilyn J., Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Rochester, 1997. Michaels, Lloyd, editor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, New York, 1999; revised edition, Cambridge, 2000. Articles: ‘‘Dreams and Shadows,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Octo- ber 1956. Gauteur, Claude, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1958. Weightman, J. G., ‘‘Bergman: An Uncertain Talent,’’ in 20th Cen- tury, December 1958. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘An Aspect of Bergman,’’ in Film (London), March-April 1959. Austin, Paul, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman, Magician of Swedish Cinema,’’ in Anglo-Swedish Review (London), April 1959. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘The Rack of Life,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1959. Blackwood, Caroline, ‘‘The Mystique of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Encounter (London), April 1961. Scott, James F., ‘‘The Achievement of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), Winter 1965. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), March 1969. Grabowski, Simon, ‘‘Picture and Meaning in Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), Winter 1970. Young, Vernon, ‘‘Cinema Borealis,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Summer 1970. Pintilie, L., in Cinema (Bucharest), February 1972. Haustrate, Gaston, in Cinéma (Paris), November 1973. Monty, Ib, in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1978. Trasatti, S., ‘‘Bergman, il paradosso di un ‘Ateo cristiano,’’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), November-December 1991. Clark, John, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 6, no. 1, September 1992. Charity, Tom, ‘‘Swede Dreams,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1305, 23 August 1995. ‘‘Special Issue: Sourires d’une nuit d’été,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 454, July 1996. Visscher, J. de, ‘‘Bergman op Video,’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 463, July 1996. *** Comedies have featured more frequently in Ingmar Bergman’s output than in his popular image as a purveyor of Nordic gloom might suggest, but few of them have achieved wide success. The sole exception—and the first film to bring him international recognition when it was acclaimed at the 1956 Cannes Festival—is Sommarnattens leende. Not without reason; for though the relative neglect of, for example, En Lektion i K?rlek or Dj?vulens Oga seems undeserved, Sommarnattens leende is without doubt Bergman’s most perfectly achieved comedy to date. The tone of the comedy is formalized, openly theatrical in its pattern: four men and four women who circle around each other, constantly changing partners in an elaborate dance of love played out amid the baroque splendor of a country mansion at the turn of the century. Presiding over the spectacle is the aged chatelaine, the former courtesan Madame Armfeldt, a burnt-out relic of bygone loves. Parallels are irresistibly suggested with Mozartian opera, especially The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute (which Bergman was later to film), as well as with A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Swedish cinema also offers a precedent in Stiller’s sexual comedy Erotikon. Yet the film is very much Bergman’s in the skillful juxtaposition of its contrasting moods and event, most notably in the scene of Henrik Egerman’s attempted suicide. The script, witty and epigrammatic, plays teasingly with such archetypally Bergmanesque themes as the nature of love, the problem of identity, and the impossibility of lasting emotional satisfaction. Within the intricate plot, Bergman explores diverse attitudes towards love using each character, each pairing, to comment on and illuminate the others. In their direct, earthy pleasure, the servants, Petra and Frid, expose the hollowness and pretensions of their supposed betters, yet they sense their own limitations beside the enchanted idealism of Henrik and Anne, the young lovers. Fredrik Egerman’s futile infatuation with Anne, his virgin bride, weakened by the feline seductions of Countess Charlotte, finally crumbles before the sardonic maturity embodied in his ex-mistress, Desirée Armfeldt. Yet even Fredrik, an absurd and repeatedly humiliated figure, evinces in his perplexed strivings a humanity lacking in the poised and coldly brutal Count Malcolm. As so often in Bergman’s films, the women come out of the whole affair distinctly better than the men. Sommarnattens leende is all of a piece; the studied elegance of the subject matter complemented by the sinuously smooth camera tech- nique, and by the seamless ensemble playing of a cast drawn largely from Bergman’s regular ‘‘rep company.’’ The film marks the culmi- nation of his early work, and also paved the way, in its rich complexity, for the tortured Gothicism of Det sjunde inseglet and the symbolic dream-landscape of Smulstronst?llet. In his subsequent output comedies became increasingly rare, and those that he produced— such as Ansiktet and F?r att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor—tended SONG OF CEYLONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1127 to suffer distortion through the intensity of the director’s personal preoccupations. But in Sommarnattens leende Bergman achieved the ideal balance between emotional involvement and ironic detachment to create a wholly satisfying comedy, and one which remains unsur- passed among his films. —Philip Kemp SONG OF CEYLON UK, 1934 Director: Basil Wright Production: GPO Film Unit for Ceylon Tea Marketing Board, begun as an Empire Marketing Board film; black and white, 35mm; running time: 40 minutes. Released 1934. Filmed in Ceylon. Producer: John Grierson; screenplay: John Grierson, Basil Wright, and others, based, in part, on a book about Ceylon written by traveller Robert Knox in 1680; photography: Basil Wright; editor: Basil Wright; sound supervisor: Alberto Cavalcanti; sound recordist: E. A. Pawley; music: Walter Leigh; the ‘‘voices of commerce’’ heard in the sound track montage: John Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Stuart Legg and Basil Wright. Cast: Lionel Wendt (Narrator). Publications Books: Grierson, John, Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy, London, 1946; revised edition, 1979. Wright, Basil, The Use of Film, London, 1948; reprinted 1972. Lovell, Alan, and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary, London, 1972. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Wright, Basil, The Long View, London, 1974. Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson, Berke- ley, 1975. Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989. Articles: Wright, Basil, ‘‘Filming in Ceylon,’’ in Cinema Quarterly (London), Summer 1934. Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 4 October 1935. McManus, John T., in New York Times, 16 August 1937. Variety (New York), 18 August 1937. Tallents, Stephen, ‘‘The Birth of British Documentary,’’ in Journal of University Film, nos. 1, 2, and 3, 1968. Sussex, Elizabeth, ‘‘Cavalcanti in England,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1975. Starr, Cecile, ‘‘Basil Wright and Song of Ceylon,” in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), November 1975. Cinema d’Aujourd’hui (Paris), February-March 1977. Gerstein, Evelyn, ‘‘English Documentary Films,’’ in The Documen- tary Tradition, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 2nd edition, New York, 1979. Fredrickson, D., ‘‘Jung/Sign/Symbol/Film,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Pleasantville, New York), Fall 1980. Jayamanne, L., ‘‘Image in the Heart,’’ in Framework (London), no. 36, 1989. Rodrigo, A., ‘‘Do You Think I Am a Woman, Ha! Do You?’’ in Discourse (Detroit), no. 11, Spring/Summer 1989. *** One of the finest achievements of the British documentary move- ment was Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon, which has been called the world’s finest example of lyrical documentary. The film’s theme, as its producer John Grierson described it, is ‘‘Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of life to offer.’’ Graham Greene, reviewing the film when it played as the second feature in a London art theatre, described it as having an ‘‘air of absolute certainty in its object and assurance in its method.’’ He singled out shots of birds in flight as ‘‘one of the loveliest visual metaphors I have ever seen on any screen.’’ Wright later said that he had seen the birds at the end of a day’s shooting, when the light was practically gone; he made his assistant unpack the cameras and get out the telephoto lens, though at the time he had no idea how the shots would be used. Wright had been sent to Ceylon to film four one-reel travelogues as publicity for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, but that purpose soon gave way to an ‘‘inner impulse’’ that made him film other sites and themes. In practical terms, he did not realize he was filming Song of Ceylon until he was back in London and had the material on a cutting bench. There was no shooting script for the film, and Wright could not screen his rushes in Ceylon. Without air transportation, it took a month just to get reports on the footage he had shot. Wright worked with one assistant, three cameras and two tripods, one of which had a finely balanced free-head which he found tricky to use but once mastered was capable of very delicate movement. This permitted some of the most remarkable panning shots ever made in film, an art he had learned from Robert Flaherty a few years earlier. The editing and sound in Song of Ceylon were done in England. Composer Walter Leigh created and recorded every effect in the film as well as all the music. Combining as many as eight tracks was both difficult and costly on the primitive equipment available to documen- tary filmmakers in the mid-1930s; at that time, sound was developed and edited on film, not on tape. The film’s narration was taken from a book written by Robert Knox in 1680, which Wright had discovered by chance in a store SONG OF CEYLON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1128 Song of Ceylon window. At the last minute, Wright inserted four titles which pre- scribes the film’s symphonic structure: ‘‘The Buddha,’’ ‘‘The Virgin Island,’’ ‘‘Voices of commerce,’’ and ‘‘The Apparel of the Gods.’’ The first section, extremely slow, follows pilgrims up a mountainside to pray. The second shows the daily life of the people. ‘‘Voices of Commerce’’ juxtaposes two systems of labor, with the sound track ironically quoting British stock market prices and the arrival and departure times for ships while Ceylonese natives gather coconuts and tea leaves by hand. The last section returns to the religious and cultural life as it had been lived by the Ceylonese people centuries before the arrival of the British. Not everyone responded favorably to the film’s poetry and beauty. Variety’s reviewer called Song of Ceylon ‘‘a shade too arty,’’ despite its ‘‘splendid camera work.’’ John T. McManus, in the New York Times, attributed the film entirely to John Grierson (without mention- ing Basil Wright’s name) and seemed bothered by what he called the film’s ‘‘basic aloofness.’’ He objected not so much to the film (‘‘beautiful job. . . striking in photographic values. . . painstaking in composition and montage’’) as to its approach. ‘‘It certainly deserves the prizes it has won, but there are prizes it could not win,’’ McManus concluded. The same could be said, however, for any film which, like Song of Ceylon, is one of a kind. Basil Wright summed up his feelings about the film in this way: ‘‘I think Song of Ceylon is the work of a young man exposed for the first time to an oriental as opposed to occidental way of life, and to a very impressive and convincing oriental religion . . . . Without any question it’s the only film I’ve ever made that I can bear to look at.’’ Wright directed or co-directed some 25 other documentaries (including the celebrated Night Mail, with Harry Watt, and World without End, with Paul Rotha). He was also author of many film articles and reviews, as well as two books—The Use of Film and The Long View. —Cecile Starr THE SORROW AND THE PITY See LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIE LE SOUFFLE AU COEURFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1129 LE SOUFFLE AU COEUR (Murmur of the Heart) France, 1971 Director: Louis Malle Production: NEF/Marianne Productions (Paris), Vides Cinematografica SAS (Rome), and Franz Seitz Productions (Mu- nich); color, 35mm; running time: 118 minutes. Released 1971. Producers: Vincent Malle and Claude Nedjar; screenplay: Louis Malle; photography: Ricardo Aronovich; music: Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet. Cast: Lea Massari (Mother); Benoit Ferreux (Laurent); Daniel Gelin (Father); Marc Winocourt (Marc); Michel Lonsdale (Father Henry); Fabien Ferreux (Thomas). Publications Script: Malle, Louis, Le Souffle au coeur, Paris, 1971. Books: Malle, Louis, with S. Kant, Louis Malle par Louis Malle, Paris, 1978. Arnold, Frank, Louis Malle, Munich, 1985. Prédal, René, Louis Malle, Paris, 1989. Malle, Louis, Malle on Malle, edited by Philip French, London, 1993. Articles: Greenspun, Roger, in New York Times, 17 October 1971. Kael, Pauline, in New Yorker, 23 October 1971. Newsweek (New York), 8 November 1971. Kalmar, S., ‘‘Louis Malle om den naturlige incest,’’ in Fant (Oslo), no. 21, 1972. Grenier, C., ‘‘There’s More to Malle Than Sex, Sex, Sex,’’ in New York Times, 6 February 1972. Brustellin, A., in Filmkritik (Munich), March 1972. Pasquariello, N., ‘‘Louis Malle: Murmuring from the Heart,’’ in InterView (New York), July 1972. Silverman, M., in Take One (Montreal), October 1972. Muzi?, N., in Ekran (Ljubijana), nos. 100–103, 1973. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Louis Malle,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Summer 1974. ‘‘Louis Malle,’’ in Current Biography Yearbook, New York, 1976. ‘‘Verso una progressiva perdita di senso,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Milan), no. 42, November 1977. Yakir, D., ‘‘From The Lovers to Pretty Baby,” in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1978. Macksey, R., ‘‘Malle on Malle: Part I,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 2, no. 1, 1982. Macksey, R., ‘‘Malle on Malle: Part II,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 2, no. 2, 1983. Wechster, Maia, ‘‘A Tale of Two Cultures: Conversation with French Film Maker Louis Malle,’’ in U.S. News & World Report, vol. 104, no. 6, 15 February 1988. Kramer, Jane, ‘‘The French & Louis Malle,’’ in Vogue, vol. 178, no. 3, March 1988. Roud, Richard, ‘‘Malle x 4: Louis Malle,’’ in Sight & Sound (Lon- don), vol. 58, no. 2, Spring 1989. ‘‘Louis Malle,’’ an interview, in American Film, vol. 14, no. 6, April 1989. Hickenlooper, G., ‘‘My Discussion with Louis,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 18, no. 2, 1991. Santamarina, A., and J. Angulo, in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 21, April 1996. *** For all the deliberate diversity and stylistic versatility of Louis Malle’s films—qualities for which he has often been criticized— certain clear thematic preoccupations can readily be seen to recur in his work. One such favorite theme is adolescence, which he handles with consistent sympathy and sensitivity—albeit from widely differ- ent standpoints—in Zazie dans le Métro, Lacombe Lucien, Black Moon, Pretty Baby and, most successfully of all, in Le Souffle au coeur. Malle has described Souffle au coeur as ‘‘my first film.’’ In fact it was his eighth feature; but it was the first which he had scripted entirely himself, and was also, he felt, ‘‘my first happy, optimistic film.’’ Loosely based on reminiscences of Malle’s own childhood, the film represents a world seen entirely from the viewpoint of its 15- year-old hero, Laurent, who is present in every scene. Little in the episodic plot is unpredictable: the boy hates his father, loves his mother, veers uncontrollably between infancy and adulthood, and is fascinated, perplexed and disconcerted by his own rampant, unfo- cused sexuality. The film’s freshness lies in the complexity and ironic affection with which Malle depicts Laurent’s fumbling attempts at self-definition, and in the physical immediacy of the family which surrounds him—a rich, convincing mixture of jokes, rows, awkward- ness, horseplay, feuds and alliances. Le Souffle au coeur also evocatively re-creates haut-bourgeois provincial society of the early 1950s—the adults obsessed with the imminent fall of Dien-Bien-Phu, their children far more interested in Camus or the latest Charlie Parker album. Beneath the light-hearted charm and the period detail, Malle’s concern, as so often in his films, is with the struggle of the individual to assert an independent existence in the face of society’s demands (and especially those of the family). Laurent’s illness (the ‘‘heart murmur’’ of the title) is shown as a response to the insistent pressures of the world about him—a tactical withdrawal which corresponds, in the more tragic context of Le Feu follet or La Vie privée, with the protagonist’s suicide. His liberation from this impasse comes through the act of incest with his mother, a crucial moment treated by Malle with exceptional subtlety and discretion, and played with total conviction by Beno?t Ferreux and Lea Massari. At the time, this scene caused considerable scandal. The French government refused the film its sanction as the official French entry at Cannes, and also banned it from being shown on ORTF (thus automatically entailing the loss of a sizable subsidy). Malle’s fault, apparently, was not in having depicted mother-son incest, but in having presented it as an event to be looked back on, in the mother’s words, ‘‘not with remorse, but with tenderness. . . as something THE SOUTHERNER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1130 beautiful.’’ Had he shown the participants tormented by guilt, or driven to suicide, it would presumably have been found more acceptable. Despite official disapproval, or possibly because of it—Le Souffle au Coeur was well received at Cannes, widely distributed in France and abroad, and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Script. With the controversy now long forgotten, the film can be taken on its own terms, and seen as one of Malle’s most personal, engaging, and thoroughly accomplished works. —Philip Kemp THE SOUTHERNER USA, 1945 Director: Jean Renoir Production: United Artists; black and white, 35mm; running time: 91 minutes. Released 1945. Filmed in Hollywood. Producers: David Loew and Robert Hakim; screenplay: Jean Renoir and Hugo Butler, uncredited assistance by William Faulkner, from the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry; photography: Lucien Andriot; editor: Gregg Tallas; music: Werner Janssen. Cast: Zachary Scott (Sam Tucker); Betty Field (Nona Tucker); Beulah Bondi (Granny Tucker); Bunny Sunshine (Daisy Tucker); Jay Gilpin (Jot Tucker); Percy Kilbride (Harmie); Blanche Yurka (Ma Tucker); Charles Kemper (Tim); J. Carrol Naish (Devers); Norman Lloyd (Finlay); Nestor Paiva (Bartender); Paul Harvey (Ruston). Award: Venice Film Festival, Best Film, 1946. Publications Script: Renoir, Jean, and Hugo Butler, The Southerner, in Best Film Plays of 1945, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, New York, 1946. Books: Davay, Paul, Jean Renoir, Brussels, 1957. Cauliez, Armand-Jean, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1962. Analyses des films de Jean Renoir, Paris, 1966. Gregor, Ulrich, editor, Jean Renoir und seine Film: Eine Dokumentation, Bad Ems, 1970. Cuenca, Carlos, Humanidad de Jean Renoir, Mexico, 1971. Leprohon, Pierre, Jean Renoir, New York, 1971. Braudy, Leo, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films, New York, 1972. Bazin, André, Jean Renoir, edited by Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, Jean Renoir, Berkeley, 1974. Renoir, Jean, My Life and My Films, New York, 1974. Beylie, Claude, Jean Renoir: Le Spectacle, la vie, Paris, 1975. Gilliatt, Penelope, Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, New York, 1975. Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. McBride, Joseph, editor, Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute Seminars on Motion Pictures and Television 2, Los Angeles, 1983. Renoir, Jean, Lettres d’Amérique, edited by Dido Renoir and Alexan- der Sesonske, Paris, 1984. Serceau, Daniel, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1985. Bertin, Celia, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1986. Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, Prince- ton, 1986. Viry-Babel, Roger, Jean Renoir: Le Jeu et la règle, Paris, 1986. Guislain, Pierre, La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, Paris, 1990. Bergan, Ronald, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, Woodstock, 1994. Cavagnac, Guy, Jean Renoir: le désir du monde, Paris, 1994. O’Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir, New York, 2000. Articles: Theatre Arts (New York), May 1945. Variety (New York), 2 May 1945. Gilson, Paul, ‘‘Jean Renoir à Hollywood,’’ Ecran Fran?aise (Paris), 15 August 1945. New York Times, 27 August 1945. The Times (London), 3 September 1945. Schoenfield, Bernard, ‘‘The Mistakes of David Loew,’’ in Screen Writer (London), October 1945. ‘‘Renoir Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1952. Truffaut, Fran?ois and Jacques Rivette, ‘‘Renoir in America,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), July-September 1954; reprinted in Films in Review (New York), November 1954. ‘‘Renoir Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Christmas, 1957. Agee, James, in Agee on Film, New York, 1958. Béranger, Jean, ‘‘Why Renoir Favors Multiple Camera, Long Sus- tained Take Technique,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), March 1960. Springer, John, ‘‘Beulah Bondi,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1963. Russell, Lee, ‘‘Jean Renoir,’’ in New Left Review (New York), May- June 1964. Kass, Judith M., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Combs, Richard, in Listener (London), 12 June 1986. Tutt, R., ‘‘Realism and Artifice in Jean Renoir’s The Southerner,’’ in Post Script (Commerce, Texas), no. 2, 1989. Viry-Babel, R., ‘‘Jean Renoir à Hollywood ou la recherche américaine d’une image fran?aise,’’ in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 1, no. 1–2, Autumn 1990. Ostria, Vincent, ‘‘L’homme du sud,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 482, July-August 1994. Magny, Jo?l, ‘‘Renoir en quête d’un monde nouveau,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 489, March 1995. Alcalde, J.A., and G. Lazaro, in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 17/18, March 1995. THE SOUTHERNERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1131 The Southerner Aldarondo, R., ‘‘America: mas que un parentesis,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 17/18, March 1995. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 16, 1995. *** The Southerner was the third of Jean Renoir’s American films (after Swamp Water and This Land is Mine), the first of his indepen- dent Hollywood productions, and the object of controversy from the start. The debates that surrounded the film upon its release and continued long thereafter, disparate as they are in origin and intent, bear one upon the other in defining the film’s central critical issue. The Southerner recounts the struggles of a family to live in independence on the land, if not their own, at least not belonging to another visible presence. The enemies are, as one expects, the extremities of weather, and unyielding soil, illness and—less con- ventionally—mean-spirited, even hostile neighbors. If ‘‘the south- erner’’ is the courageous Sam Tucker, he is also the dour, stone- hearted Devers, as well as the tight-fisted Harmie. The film’s very title, in its generality (suggesting ‘‘the southerner’’ as a type) proved, perhaps as much as the story, a provocation. The first of the controversies was local. Considered a sordid depiction of life in the southern states, the film was banned in Tennessee and attacked throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan announced a boycott. To these inhabitants, The Southerner presented in realistic terms a derogatory image of the people of that region. The second of the controversies was critical. James Agee, who knew the South well, objected that, on the contrary there was nothing realistic in Renoir’s depiction of the region; Renoir had failed to convey not only the character of the southerner, but the speech, the gait, the facial expressions. To Agee, in spite of William Faulkner’s well-publicized consultation on dialogue, the film rang false. Agee’s was, as Ray- mond Durgnat points out, an objection based on the definition of authenticity borrowed from naturalism: from appearance to essence, from the outside in. Renoir had understood none of the codes of the region or its people. Renoir’s South was clearly not one of surface verisimilitude, but neither did his definition of realism depend on what André Bazin called ‘‘the crust of realism which blinds us.’’ The direction of realism is from the inside out. The camera work, particularly in the exterior locations often shot in deep focus, captures the desolate landscape of a southern winter. A foggy river bank; Beulah Bondi, SOY CUBA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1132 alone, stubborn and miserable, atop a cart in the pouring rain; and a hut hardly fit for human shelter are a few of the quasi-surreal images that translate Renoir’s vision of rural America as a land of loneliness and isolation, without the comfort of neighbor or faith, depressed materially and especially morally. It was on the spirit of the place and times, not on the accent or gesture, that Renoir based and defined his portrait of ‘‘the southerner.’’ —Mirella Jona Affron SOY CUBA (I Am Cuba; Ja Kuba) USSR/Cuba, 1964 Director: Mikhail Kalatozov Production: Mosfilm (USSR) and ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos); black and white, 35 mm; running time: 141 minutes. Filmed in Cuba; released 1964; released in United States, 1995. Cinematographer: Sergei Urusevsky; screenplay: Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet; editor: Nina Glagoleva; production design: Yevgeny Svidetelev; music: Carlos Farinas; costume design: René Portocarrero; makeup: Luz M. Cáceres, Vera Soy Cuba Rudina; sound: Vladimir Sharun, Rodolfo Plaza (assistant); special effects: Boris Travkin, A. Vinokurov. Cast: Luz Maria Collazo (Maria/Betty); José Gallardo (Pedro); Sergio Corrieri (Alberto); Raúl Garcia (Enrique); Celia Rodriquez (Gloria); Jean Bouise (Jim); Roberto García York (American activ- ist); Luisa María Jiménez (Teresa); Mario González Broche (Pablo); Raquel Revuelta (The voice of Cuba); Salvador Wood; Alberto Morgan; Fausto Mirabal; María de las Mercedes Díez; Bárbara Domínquez; Jesús del Monte; Tony López; Héctor Casta?eda; Rosenda Lamadriz; Robert Villar; Roberto Cabrera; Alfredo ávila; José Espinosa; Rafael Díaz; Pepe Ramírez; Isabel Moreno; Manuel J. Mora; Aramis Delgado. Awards: National Society of Film Critics Archival Award, 1995. Publications Books: Bogomolov, Iurij, Mikhail Kalatozov: stranicy tvorcheskoj biografii, Moscow, 1989. Zorkaya, Neya, The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema, New York, 1989. Articles: Hill, Steven P., ‘‘The Soviet Film Today,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley) vol. 20, no. 4, Summer 1967. Thomajan, Dale, ‘‘I Am Cuba: Handheld Heaven, Agitprop Purga- tory,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, March-April 1995. Iordanova, Dina, ‘‘I Am Cuba,’’ in The Russian Review, vol. 56, January 1997. Hoberman, J., ‘‘I Am Cuba,’’ in The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Philadelphia, 1998. Morris, Gary, ‘‘The Poetry of Revolution: I Am Cuba!,’’ in Bright Lights Film Journal, no. 23, December 1998; http:// www.brightlightsfilm.com/23/iamcuba.html. Smith, Paul Julian, ‘‘I Am Cuba,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), no. 8, August 1999. Films: Turksib and Salt for Svanetia (videorecording), New York, Kino on Video, 1997. *** I Am Cuba is a masterpiece from the USSR, co-produced with Cuba in a grand style with a large Communist Party budget by two of the greatest cinema artists from the Soviet Union, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky. It was the success of Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s 1957 classic, Cranes Are Flying (which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958), that landed them the film and a prolonged stay on the island that fascinated so many Soviets in the early 1960s. Set in pre-Castro days, I Am Cuba presents four separate stories of poor and downtrodden victims of capitalist and imperialist exploita- tion who are brought, individually and personally, to revolution. In THE SPANISH EARTHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1133 episode number one, a beautiful Cuban girl, dressed in white, meets with her fiancé (a handsome fruit dealer and a political activist) in front of a church, as he speaks of their upcoming wedding. She subsequently goes off to her night job—into the dark and decadent space of an exclusive jazz club catering to tourists, where she works as a prostitute. Her customer insists on spending the night in her home, where her fiancé happens upon the morning aftermath of this transaction. In episode number two, an old sugar cane farmer, a widower, loses his farm to local barons and the United Fruit Company, and torches all of his fields. Episode three features a young student revolutionary who rescues a local girl from a stalking group of inebriated, American sailors looking for prey and is later killed in a demonstration—proud, resisting martyr to an evil regime. Episode four moves to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where a peasant refuses to join the liberation forces until his hut and his family are hit by an aerial bombing attack by the Batista regime. While some Americans may object to the stereotypical depiction of the United States and U.S. citizens in the film, it should be noted that the film was labeled ‘‘anti- revolutionary’’ in Cuba and accused of ‘‘idealizing the Yankees’’ in Russia. Resisting a single reading, I Am Cuba is a moving testament to the Cold War and to some of the most dramatic moments of that war—the stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union in relation to Cuba. It is not the story line of the film that has caught the attention of cinema audiences world-wide, however, but its dramatic, passionate, and impulsive cinematic style. Accused of ‘‘formalism’’ or ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ and said to lack drama and personal interest, I Am Cuba received stern criticism in official Soviet publications and was a box- office failure in Russia in the 1960s. It was, however, the daring cinematic style and technical sophistication of the film that was responsible for its second birth in the 1980s in the West, where it has been hailed as ‘‘the greatest Soviet film since the 1920s’’ by Steven P. Hill, and ‘‘a supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form’’ by Gary Morris. Fascinating film-makers and professionals with its unbelievable angles and shots, I Am Cuba uses a bold, reckless, hand- held camera that rises and falls, tips and sways with a Latin beat to look at the world through a wide-angle, 9.8 mm lens, flattening and distorting many of the film’s images. The infrared film stock chosen by the director further heightens the emotion of the film, bringing black and white into stark contrast. Penetrating into the life of the island, into the rhythm of a culture for sale, pursuing and following, the film presents the spectator with elaborate crane shots and extreme long takes ‘‘that make Welles’ Touch of Evil seem mild,’’ according to one critic. The unusual tilts and unexpected camera angles recall early Soviet film, especially propaganda films, or agit-prop, but depart from traditional uses of those angles, hence undermining simple readings and challenging viewer expectations. While much credit for the unusual camera work has been given to cameraman Urusevsky, many elements of the film style must be attributed to Kalatozov, who began his cinema career as a cameraman at the Georgian Film Studio in Tbilisi (Tiflis) in the 1920s. All of Kalatozov’s films are marked by his signature style—striking, unex- pected camera angles, the dramatic use of light and shade, a free- wheeling hand-held camera, perpetual motion shots, swish pans, and 360 degree horizontal pans. The dramatic sequence so often cited in descriptions of I Am Cuba—where the camera descends, slowly, from a bikini fashion show atop a Havana high-rise hotel, to the swimming pool at the base of the building, and dives under water, to gaze upon more girls in bikinis swimming with Urusevsky (who holds the camera?)—was a modernized, technically improved version of the trip up the side of an ancient tower and a rushing descent (like a rock, hurled at an invader), in Svanetia, high in the Caucasus Mountains, from Kalatozov’s film of 1930, Salt for Svanetia. The script for I Am Cuba was written by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with Cuban poet Enrique Pineda Barnet, and is limited to the voice of Cuba herself, a first person narration intoning the sad fate of Cuba, invaded, exploited, raped, pillaged, and sold to the highest bidder. Some of the most unforgettable sequences in the film include the arrival in Cuba, by air and by water; the descent of the camera from the sky-scraper fashion show (mentioned above); the fire in the sugar cane field; and the escape of the American tourist from the neighborhood where he took his pleasure from a local girl. —Julie Christensen THE SPANISH EARTH USA, 1937 Director: Joris Ivens Production: Contemporary Historians, Inc. (New York); black and white, 35mm; running time: 53 minutes. Released 1937. Filmed March-May 1937 in the village of Fuentedue?a and Madrid, Spain; also on the Jarama and Morata de Taju?a fighting fronts. Screenplay (commentary): Ernest Hemingway; narration (English version): spoken by Ernest Hemingway; narration (French version): translated by E. Guibert and spoken by Joris Ivens; narration (original narration used in previews at the White House) spoken by Orson Welles; photography: John Ferno; editor: Helen Van Dongen; sound supervisor: Irving Reis; music: Marc Blitzstein; arranger: Virgil Thomson. Award: National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, one of Top Ten of 1937. Publications Script: Hemingway, Ernest, The Spanish Earth, Cleveland, Ohio, 1938. Books: Klaue, W., and others, Joris Ivens, Berlin, 1963. Zalzman, Abraham, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1963. Grelier, Robert, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1965. Wegner, Hans, Joris Ivens, Dokumentarist den Wahreit, Berlin, 1965. Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I, New York, 1969. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Kremeier, Klaus, Joris Ivens: Ein Filmer an den Fronten der Welt- revolution, Berlin, 1976. Jacobs, Lewis, editor, The Documentary Tradition, second edition, New York, 1979. THE SPANISH EARTH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1134 The Spanish Earth Delmar, Rosalind, Joris Ivens: 50 Years of Filmmaking, London, 1979. Devarrieux, Claire, Entretiens avec Joris Ivens, Paris, 1979. Passek, Jean-Loup, editor, Joris Ivens: 50 ans de cinéma, Paris, 1979. Phillips, Gene D., Hemingway and Film, New York, 1980. Alexander, William, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942, Princeton, 1981. Ivens, Joris, and Robert Destanque, Joris Ivens; ou, La Mémoire d’un régard, Paris, 1982. Brunel, Claude, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1983. Waugh, Thomas, editor, ‘‘Show Us Life’’: Towards a History and Aesthetic of the Committed Documentary, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1984. Schoots, Hans, Gevaarlijk leven: een biografie van Joris Ivens, Amsterdam, 1995. Bakker, Kees, editor, Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, Amsterdam, 1999. Articles: Hemingway, Ernest, in New York Times, 10 April 1937. Variety (New York), 21 July 1937. New Yorker, 21 August 1937. Time (New York), 23 August 1937. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 1 September 1937. Spectator (London), 12 November 1937. Stebbins, R., and Jay Leyda, ‘‘Joris Ivens: Artist in Documentary,’’ in Magazine of Art (New York), July 1938. Grenier, Cynthia, ‘‘Joris Ivens: Social Realist vs. Lyric Poet,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1958. Cobos, Juan, and others, ‘‘Orson Welles,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 165, April 1965. Giraud, T., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1976. Cornaud, A., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. Oms, Marcel, and Robert Grelier, in Cahiers de la Cinemathèque (Perpignan), January 1977. Verstappen, W., ‘‘Hemingway or Ivens: Spaanse aarde,” in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1978. ‘‘Spanish Earth Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinema (Paris), 1 Janu- ary 1981. Waugh, Thomas, ‘‘Men Cannot Act in Front of the Camera in the Presence of Death,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 12, nos. 2, 1982, and no. 3, 1983. THE SPANISH EARTHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1135 Trojan, Judith, in Wilson Library Bulletin, vol. 59, October 1984. Biltereyst, Daniel, ‘‘Temps et espace dans Terre d’Espagne,’’ in Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), no. 17, Autumn 1986. Snoek, S., ‘‘Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway: le voci di Spanish Earth,’’ in Cinegrafie (Ancona), vol. 5, no. 8, 1995. *** When the Spanish Civil War broke out, in July 1936, Joris Ivens was in the USA at the invitation of the New York Film Alliance, and had already begun to involve himself in the cultural politics of the New Deal and the Popular Front. His first response to the outbreak of the war was to collaborate on a project with his editor Helen Van Dongen and the novelist John Dos Passos which, by means of re- edited newsreel footage of the conflict, would explain the issues and background to the American people. However, the original material’s pro-Franco stance proved a problem and, as Ivens put it, ‘‘I remarked that it would be cheaper and more satisfactory in every respect to make such a documentary film on the spot, instead of being at the mercy of newsreel costs and newsreel attitudes.’’ Spain in Flames was thus rapidly completed, and, on the initiative of the editor of Fortune, Archibald MacLeish, a group of writers, including Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, got together and formed a production company, Contemporary Historians Inc., which sent Ivens to Spain with the princely sum of $3,000 with which to make a film about the war. In Paris he teamed up with his cameraman John Ferno, who shot the bulk of the Spanish footage, and they were later joined in Spain by Dos Passos. When the latter left his place was taken by Ernest Hemingway, then war correspondent for the North American News Alliance, who both wrote and spoke the film’s commentary. Ivens’s original idea was to illustrate the background to and causes of the Civil War by telling the story of a village’s political growth, from the fall of the monarchy, the period of agricultural reform, the outbreak of war, the village’s capture by Franco’s forces, through to its recapture by the Republicans. Much of the action would focus on one particular peasant family, whose coming to political conscious- ness would symbolise the development of the peasantry as a whole, while the village itself would stand in as a cross section of Spanish society. Obviously, such a project would involve a great deal of dramatization and re-enactment, but Ivens had already experimented along these lines in the remarkable Borinage. Once in Spain, how- ever, Ivens and Ferno realised that such a complex film would be impossible in the circumstances. As Ivens himself said: ‘‘How could we ask people who had fought in the fields and in the trenches in and around Madrid to help reconstruct the atmosphere of King Alfonso’s abdication? These people were too deeply involved in their fight to think how a typical village had behaved before the war. We felt shame at not having recognised this. One could not possibly ask people who were engaged in a life and death struggle to be interested in anything outside that struggle.’’ They therefore set off for Madrid and the front, eager to film the conflict itself. However, something of the original plan remained in their development of ‘‘an approach that would place equal accents on the defence of Madrid and on one of the small nearby villages linked to the defence because it produced Madrid’s food.’’ They finally settled on one particular village, Fuenteduena, which was on the vital Valencia-Madrid highway, in an area which had only recently been confiscated from landlords, and where an important irrigation project was under construction. The front and the village, each of which depends upon the other, are further linked by the figure of the young peasant from Fuenteduena who has become a soldier and is now fighting for the Republic in Madrid, thereby accentuating the main theme of the film: ‘‘Working the earth and fighting for the earth,’’ in Ivens’s words. In the end, with its mix of documentary and re-constructed elements, Spanish Earth is at once a less elaborate but more complex film than that first conceived by Ivens: one critic aptly describes it as ‘‘an improvised hybrid of many filmic modes.’’ This gives the film a curiously contemporary feel, but what really marks it out as a landmark of documentary filmmaking is its directness, its sense of immediacy, and its refusal to have any truck with spurious notions of ‘‘objectivity.’’ Ivens himself states that ‘‘My unit had really become part of the fighting forces,’’ and again, ‘‘We never forgot that we were in a hurry. Our job was not to make the best of all films, but to make a good film for exhibition in the United States, in order to collect money to send ambulances to Spain. When we started shooting we didn’t always wait for the best conditions to get the best shot. We just tried to get good, useful shots.’’ When asked why he hadn’t tried to be more ‘‘objective’’ Ivens retorted that ‘‘a documentary film maker has to have an opinion on such vital issues as fascism or anti-fascism—he has to have feelings about these issues, if his work is to have any dramatic, emotional or art value,’’ adding that ‘‘after informing and moving audiences, a militant documentary film should agitate— mobilise them to become active in connection with the problems shown in the film.’’ Not that Spanish Earth is in any sense strident— indeed, quite the reverse. Ivens understands fully the power of restraint and suggestion, quoting approvingly, à propos his film, John Steinbeck’s observation of the London blitz that ‘‘In all of the little stories it is the ordinary, the commonplace thing or incident against the background of the bombing that leaves the indelible picture.’’ Ivens’s visual restraint is matched by that of the commentary. Originally this was spoken by Orson Welles, but Ivens felt that ‘‘There was something in the quality of his voice that separated it from the film, from Spain, from the actuality of the film.’’ Heming- way’s manner of speaking, however, perfectly matched the pared- down quality of his writing. Ivens saw the function of the commentary as being ‘‘to provide sharp little guiding arrows to the key points of the film’’ and as serving as ‘‘a base on which the spectator was stimulated to form his own conclusions.’’ He described Heming- way’s mode of delivery as sounding like that of ‘‘a sensitive reporter who has been on the spot and wants to tell you about it. The lack of a professional commentator’s smoothness helped you to believe intensely in the experiences on the screen.’’ The film’s avoidance of overt propagandizing reflected not only Ivens’s conception of the documentary aesthetic—it was also hoped that this might help Spanish Earth achieve a wide theatrical release. However, as in Britain, there was thought to be no cinema audience for documentary films, and the plan failed. Nor did it help the film to escape the watchful eye of the British Board of Film Censors (who had previously attacked Ivens’s New Earth), who insisted that all references to Italian and German intervention were cut from the commentary, those countries being regarded as ‘‘friendly powers’’ at the time. —Julian Petley THE SPIRIT BREATHES WHERE IT WILL See CONDAMNE A MORT S’EST ECHAPPE SPOORLOOS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1136 SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE See ESPIRITU DE LA COLMENA SPOORLOOS (The Vanishing) Netherlands-France, 1988 Director: George Sluizer Production: Golden Egg Film, Ingrid Productions, for MGS Film; colour, 35mm; running time: 106 minutes. Producers: Anne Lordon and George Sluizer; screenplay: Tim Krabbé, based on his novel The Golden Egg; photography: Toni Kuhn; editor: George Sluizer and Lin Friedman; assistant directors: Natasa Hanusova and Anouk Sluizer; art directors: Santiago Isidro Pin and Cor Spijk; music: Henny Vrienten; sound editor: Stefan Kamp; sound recording: Piotr Van Dijk. Cast: Gene Bervoets (Rex Hofman); Johanna Ter Steege (Saskia); Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu (Raymond Lemorne); Tania Latarjet (Denise); Lucille Glen (Gabrielle). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 19 October 1988. Stillwater, M., ‘‘Donnadieu le dur au coeur tendre,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), December 1989. Cordaiy, H., ‘‘’I Hope I Disturb You,’’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 81, Summer 1989/1990. Pernod, P., ‘‘Savoir et pouvoir,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1990. Newman, Kim, Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1990. Desjardins, D., ‘‘L’homme qui voulait savoir,’’ in Séquences (Paris), September 1990. Maslin, J., ‘‘Review/Film: How Evil Can One Person Be?’’ in New York Times, vol. 140, C8, 25 January 1991. Rafferty, T., ‘‘Full Stop,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 66, 28 January 1991. Dargis, M., ‘‘National Obsessions,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 36, 29 January 1991. Denby, D., ‘‘Fatal Distraction,’’ in New York Magazine, vol. 24, 4 February 1991. Kauffmann, S., ‘‘Three from Europe,’’ in New Republic, vol. 204, 4 March 1991. Nicastro, N., ‘‘Passengers,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March- April 1991. Simon, J., ‘‘Horror, Domestic and Imported,’’ in National Review, vol. 43, 29 April 1991. Anderson, P., Films in Review (New York), May-June 1991. Avins, Mimi, ‘‘From a Dutch Director: A Scary Twice-Told Tale,’’ in The New York Times, vol. 142, section 2, H20, 14 February 1993. Jones, A., in Cinefantastique (Forest Park), vol. 29, no. 11, 1998. *** Spoorloos represents one of the most extraordinary realisations of the psychological thriller captured on film. The heartbreaking, yet horrific ending of the film leaves the spectator in no doubt of their own vulnerability in the battle of human nature against a society in which random acts of madness occur. On many levels comparisons can be drawn by the obsessive nature of both protagonists. The obsessive curiosity of the boyfriend, Rex (Gene Bervoets), to reveal what has happened to his girlfriend, Saskia (Johanna Ter Steege), who was abducted from a service station on route to a holiday destination, is mirrored by the abductor’s, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), own curiosity of human na- ture’s darker side, and its ability to manifest itself through evil deeds. The abductor’s approach and rationale are entirely scientific, thus allowing him to distance himself emotionally from the actual deed. This approach allows him the luxury of maintaining a seemingly happy marriage and family life, unlike the boyfriend, whose very ability to have insight and uncalculated emotions causes his ulti- mate demise. The continuation of Raymond’s exploration of his dark side, without any thought of redemption or forgiveness, amplifies the depth of his pathology. Over a period of years Rex’s search for Saskia is brought to public attention by his poster and TV campaign through which he hopes to gain knowledge of her whereabouts. Raymond’s very normalcy juxtaposed with his victim’s anguish creates superb filmic tension. The film’s lulling pace and parallel plot line takes the audience on a terrifying journey as the eventual fate of Saskia is revealed in the final minute of the story. The ensuing shock is created when we realise that Rex, who has insisted that the madman tell him what has happened, drinks spiked coffee in exchange for this knowledge, awakens to discover he has been buried alive. The climax of the film is surely one of greatest shocking moments in cinema. An intricate examination of the human condition, Spoorloos represents the emergence of a new wave of psychological thrillers. A thoroughly discomfiting film, Spoorloos succeeds through its expert storytelling and the absolutely jolting denouement. In the 1993 American remake—an insult to the original film version—director George Sluizer was unable to translate Tim Krabbe’s vision from his novel The Golden Egg. —Marion Pilowsky THE SPRAYER SPRAYED See L’ARROSEUR ARROSE SPRING IN A SMALL CITY See XIAO CHENG ZHI CHUN STACHKAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1137 Spoorloos STACHKA (Strike) USSR, 1924 Director: Sergei Eisenstein Production: Goskino; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 73 minutes; length: 1,969 meters. Released 1924. Producer: Boris Mikhine; screenplay: V. Pletniev, I. Kravtchunovsky, Grigori Alexandrov, and Sergei Eisenstein (called the Proletkuit Collective); photography: Edouard Tisse with V. Popov and V. Khvatov; production designer: Vasili Rakhas; assistant directors: G. Alexandrov, A. Levshin, and I. Kravchinovski. Cast: Maxim Straukh (The Spy); Grigori Alexandrov (The Foreman); Mikhail Gomorov (The Worker); I. Ivanov (Chief of Police); I. Klyukvine (The Activist); A. Antonov (Member of the strike); J. Glizer, B. Yourtzev, A. Kouznetzov, V. Ianoukova, V. Ouralsky, M. Mamine, and members of the Proletariat Troup. Publications Script: Eisenstein, Sergei, and others, Stachka, in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), November 1981. Books: Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Sense, edited by Jay Leyda, New York, 1942. Rotha, Paul, Ivor Montagu, and John Grierson, Eisenstein, 1898–1948, London, 1948. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form, edited by Jay Leyda, New York, 1949. Sergei Eisenstein—Kunstler der Revolution, Berlin, 1960. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Mitry, Jean, S. M. Eisenstein, Paris, 1961. STACHKA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1138 Stachka Moussinac, Léon, Sergei Eisenstein, New York, 1970. Barna, Yon, Eisenstein, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Fernandez, Dominique, Eisenstein, Paris, 1975. Sudendorf, W., and others, Sergei M. Eisenstein: Materialien zu Leben und Werk, Munich, 1975. Seton, Marie, Sergei M. Eisenstein, London, 1978. Aumont, Jacques, Montage Eisenstein, Paris, 1979; London, 1987. Leyda, Jay, and Zina Vignow, Eisenstein at Work, New York, 1982. Eisenstein, Sergei M., Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, Bos- ton, 1983. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1983. Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film, London, 1985. Polan, Dana B., The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Eisenstein, Sergei M., Selected Works, Volume 1: Writings 1922–1934, edited by Richard Taylor, London, 1988. Bordwell, David, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Cambridge, 1993. Goodwin, James, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History, Champaign, 1993. Lovgren, Hakan, editor, Eisenstein’s Labyrinth: Aspects of a Cine- matic Synthesis of the Arts, Philadelphia, 1996. Taylor, Richard, editor, The Eisenstein Reader, Bloomington, 1998. Bergan, Ronald, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict, New York, 1999. Articles: Montague, Ivor, ‘‘Sergei Eisenstein,’’ in Penguin Film Review (Lon- don), September 1948. Montagu, Ivor, ‘‘Rediscovery: Strike,” in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1956. Knight, Arthur, ‘‘Eisenstein and the Mass Epic,’’ in The Liveliest Art, New York, 1957. Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), March 1961. Kuiper, John, ‘‘Cinematic Expression: A Look at Eisenstein’s Silent Montage,’’ in Art Journal, Fall 1962. Yourenev, Rostislav, ‘‘Eisenstein,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma, Paris, 1966. ‘‘La Greve Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1967. New York Times, 15 March 1968. Siegler, R., ‘‘Masquage: An Extrapolation of Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage-as-Conflict to the Multi-Image Film,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1968. A STAR IS BORNFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1139 McDonald, Dwight, ‘‘Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Others,’’ in The Emergence of Film Art, edited by Lewis Jacobs, New York, 1969. Kuleshov, Lev, ‘‘Kuleshov on Eisenstein,’’ in Film Journal (New York), Fall-Winter 1972. Eisenstein, Sergei, in Skrien (Amsterdam), May-June 1973. Sklovskij, V., in Filmwissenschaftliche Beitr?ge (East Berlin), no.15, 1974. Crofts, Stephen, ‘‘Eisenstein and Ideology,’’ in Framework (Norwich), Spring 1978. Perry, T., ‘‘Sergei Eisenstein: A Career in Pictures,’’ in American Film (Washington, DC), January-February 1983. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘Ejzenstein-Faure: Rapporto senza dissonanze?’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), December 1984. Doufour, D., ‘‘!Revolutie? (2),’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), vol. 428, January 1993. Doufour, D., ‘‘!Revolutie? (3),’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), vol. 430, March 1993. Beller, J., ‘‘The Spectatorship of the Proletariat,’’ in Boundary 2, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995. Virmaux, A., and O. Virmaux, ‘‘La greve (1924) d’Eisenstein,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), vol. 239, September/October 1996. Richardson, Paul E., ‘‘The First Master of Russian Film,’’ in Russian Life, vol. 41, no. 2, February 1998. *** Envisioning a film which would both reflect and embody the essence of Russia’s 1917 revolution, the 26-year-old Sergei Eisenstein directed his first feature film, Strike, in 1924. Strike was to have been one of eight projects in a state-sponsored series entitled Towards Dictatorship, with reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The focus of the series was intended to be the struggles of the working class which preceded and paved the way for the revolution. Eisenstein’s Strike was the only film of this group to be realized. At that time Eisenstein’s central aesthetic concerns were the practice of montage and the concept of the mass hero. It is not his political or social intent but, rather, his methods which continue to be of interest. As propaganda the film cannot be termed an unqualified success; it does not arouse passion or provoke protest today as does Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, for example. But the impact of Strike’s aesthetic boldness remains undiminished. It is an impact which can be explained in terms of mechanical energy, on both formal and material levels. One function of art is to subordinate man’s environment to man, to bring the technical land- scape into the realm of human affairs rather than allow it to dominate or intimidate its creators. Eisenstein, in accepting this challenge, depicts the environment of the workers in Strike as part of their lives. The film’s opening shot of factory smokestacks sets the tone. Shots of written communications which urge, ‘‘Workers of the world, unite,’’ are intercut with shots of machinery in motion. The workers look healthy and at home in the factory amid shining, powerful machines and moving parts; and Edouard Tisse’s camera embraces factory as readily as it embraces worker. The human is not oppressed by machinery. On the contrary, the workers enlist the machinery in their struggle against the repre- sentatives of capitalism. The machines become weapons. On another level, the machinery serves a musical function; the very conscious internal rhythm of the film is often determined by spinning flywheels or other moving mechanical parts. This Constructivist approach is less notable in the long run than is the more personal aspect of Eisenstein’s work in Strike—his use of montage. He described his conception of montage as collision, and it is important to note that the collision of elements in his work never results in a loss of energy. The film as a whole is something of a perpetual motion machine, with each action or movement yielding its force to a subsequent action or movement. One of the most pleasing examples of this principle is contained in the following sequence: a large crowd is seen in long shot making its way through the village; at the instant the crowd passes a liquor store, an explosion occurs and the crowd as a whole turns and veers slightly toward the explosion in a movement as graceful and precise as the movement of the arm of a conductor bringing an orchestra to a sudden halt. The pause is but momentary, and the movement continues in a new direction as the crowd flows toward the camera in the next shot. Most of the forms of montage which Eisenstein elaborated in his books Film Form and The Film Sense can be found in Strike. For example, association montage compares a hand-operated citrus fruit crusher used by the dining businessmen to the rearing horses of the mounted police as they harass a peaceful crowd of strikers. Eisenstein believed that the meaning of a film should arise from the juxtaposition of its elements rather than be continued within those elements. Although the official purpose of his government-sponsored film was to inform the masses, Eisenstein believed that films should not merely carry information but impart sensation and impression. For this reason Strike is meant to inspire action, not reflection. The film never bogs down in its theoretical base. It is perhaps for these reasons that Strike can be distinguished from so-called ‘‘bourgeois’’ films. Not even when a worker commits suicide after being falsely accused of theft does the film pause for any emotion to be displayed. Rather, the worker’s suicide note—‘‘Goodbye, remember, I am not guilty’’—initiates the strike. It also anticipates the film’s conclusion after the slaughter of the strikers—a close shot of a pair of staring, admonishing eyes and the caption ‘‘Remember—Proletarians!’’ —Barbara Salvage A STAR IS BORN USA, 1954 Director: George Cukor Production: Transcona Enterprises; Technicolor, 35mm, CinemaScope; running time: 154 minutes, originally 182 minutes. Released 1954 by Warner Bros. Re-released 1983 with original 47 minutes restored. Producers: Sidney Luft with Vern Alves; screenplay: Moss Hart, from the screenplay for the 1937 version (Wellman) based, in turn, on the film What Price Hollywood? (Cukor); photography: Sam Leavitt; editor: Folmar Blangsted; production designer: Gene Alen; art A STAR IS BORN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1140 A Star Is Born director: Malcolm Bert; music: Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, and Leonard Gershe; costume designers: Jean Louis and Mary Ann Nyberg; choreography: Richard Barstow. Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester); James Mason (Norman Maine); Jack Carson (Matt Libby); Charles Bickford (Oliver Niles); Tommy Noonan (Danny McGuire); Lucy Marlow (Lola Lavery); Amanda Blake (Susan Ettinger); Irving Bacon (Graves); Hazel Shermet (Libby’s secretary); James Brown (Glenn Williams); Lotus Robb (Miss Markham); Joan Shawlee (Announcer); Dub Taylor (Driver); Louis Jean Heydt (Director); Bob Jellison (Eddie); Chick Chandler (Man in car); Leonard Penn (Director); Blythe Daly (Miss Fusselow); Mae Marsh (Party guest); Frank Ferguson (Judge); Nadene Ashdown (Esther, age 6); Heidi Meadows (Esther, age 3); Henry Kulky (Cuddles); Jack Harmon (1st dancer); Don McCabe (2nd dancer); Eric Wilton (Valet); Grady Sutton (Carver); Henry Russell (Orchestra leader); Robert Dumas (Drummer); Laurindo Almeida (Guitarist); Bobby Sailes (Dancer); Percy Helton (Drunk); Charles Watts (Harrison); Stuart Holmes (Spectator); Grandon Rhodes (Producer); Frank Puglia (Bruno); Wilton Graff (Master of Cer- emonies—last scene). Publications Books: Langlois, Henri, and others, Hommage à George Cukor, Paris, 1963. Domarchi, Jean, George Cukor, Paris, 1965. McVay, Douglas, The Musical Film, London, 1967. Morella, Joe, and Edward Epstein, Judy—The Films of Judy Garland, New York, 1969. Steiger, Brad, Judy Garland, New York, 1969. Carey, Gary, Cukor and Co.: The Films of George Cukor, New York, 1971. Lambert, Gavin, On Cukor, New York, 1972. Clarens, Carlos, George Cukor, London, 1976. Parish, James R., and Michael Pitts, Hollywood on Hollywood, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Mason, James, Before I Forget: Autobiography and Drawings, Lon- don, 1981. Phillips, Gene D., George Cukor, Boston, 1982. Bernadoni, James, George Cukor: A Critical Study and Filmography, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1985. A STAR IS BORNFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1141 Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Lon- don, 1987. Haver, Ronald, A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and its 1983 Restoration, New York, 1988; 1990. Morley, Sheridan, James Mason: Odd Man Out, New York, 1989. McGilligan, Patrick, George Cukor: A Double Life—A Biography of the Gentleman Director, New York, 1992. Shipman, David, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend, New York, 1993. Levy, Emanuel, George Cukor, Master of Elegance: Hollywood’s Legendary Director and His Stars, New York, 1994. Sweeney, Kevin, James Mason: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1999. Clarke, Gerald, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, New York, 2000. Articles: Brinson, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), December 1954. Bitsch, Charles, ‘‘Naissance du cinémascope,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1955. Tozzi, Romano, ‘‘George Cukor,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1958. Reid, John Howard, ‘‘George Cukor,’’ in Films in Filming (London), August and September 1960. Jomy, Alain, ‘‘Connaissance de George Cukor,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), June 1963. ‘‘Retrospective Cukor,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1964. Overstreet, Richard, ‘‘Interview with George Cukor,’’ in Film Cul- ture (New York), no. 34, 1964. Nogeuira, Rui, ‘‘James Mason Talks About His Career in the Cin- ema,’’ in Focus on Film (London), March-April 1970. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), January 1974. Legrand, M., in Positif (Paris), February 1974. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Cukor,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March- April 1978. Jennings, W., ‘‘Nova: Garland in A Star Is Born,” in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Pleasantville, New York), no. 3, 1979. Mitchell, Robert, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Bodeen, DeWitt, ‘‘George Cukor,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1981. Phillips, Gene D., ‘‘George Cukor: Fifty Years of Filmmaking,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1982. Villien, Bruno, and others, ‘‘George Cukor,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1982. ‘‘Cukor Section’’ of Casablanca (Madrid), March 1983. Magny, Joel, ‘‘George Cukor: Un Homme qui s’affiche,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), March 1983. New York Times, 15 April 1983. Haver, R., ‘‘A Star Is Born Again,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), July-August 1983. Simons, J., in Skrien (Amsterdam), Winter 1983–84. Roddick, Nick, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1984. ‘‘A Star Is Born Issue’’ of American Cinematographer (Los Ange- les), February 1984. Calum, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), August 1984. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), September 1984. Rabourdin, D., ‘‘Deux rencontres avec James Mason,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), September 1984. Cieutat, M., ‘‘James Mason, Bigger Than Stars,’’ in Positif (Paris), November 1984. Arts, A., in Skrien (Amsterdam), November-December 1984. Eyquem, O., in Positif (Paris), April 1985. Doyle, N., ‘‘Letters,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 40, October 1989. Stanbrook, A., ‘‘As It Was in the Beginning,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 1, 1989–90. Lassell, M., ‘‘Mirror of the Mind,’’ in Movieline (Escondido, Califor- nia), March 1990. Berthomé, Jean-Pierre, ‘‘L’oeuvre insaisissable,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 424, June 1996. *** The ‘‘birth of a star’’ has proved to be a durable cinematic conceit. The story of the fading, alcoholic male actor who discovers a talented young woman, fosters her career, marries her, and finally commits suicide was first made in 1937, directed by William Wellman, with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The 1954 George Cukor version represents the basic outline of the original scenario while transform- ing the woman into a singer. And in 1976, the situation served rock stardom as well, with Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The germ for this theme and its variations is the 1932 What Price Hollywood?, also directed by George Cukor, starring Constance Bennett, Lowell Sherman and Neil Hamilton. There, the male figure is divided in two—a drunken director and a society husband—and the film reunites husband and wife in a happy ending. But it is the 1954 Star that is most often revived and best remembered. Hollywood has made many reflexive films in which it examines its own procedures, manners, and mythology. The trenchant reflexivity of Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful and A Star Is Born (products of those difficult Hollywood years, 1950–54) is in the intimate exposure of the performer’s craft, a particularly painful exposure when we learn that craft and life are so intimately con- nected. It is impossible to separate Gloria Swanson and Lana Turner from the fictions they incarnate. The connections are most troubling in the case of Judy Garland, the star who is presumably born, but who, in fact, is nearly at the end of her musical career. The only other film in which her singing is prominently featured is her last effort, made in England, I Could Go on Singing, with its sickeningly ironic title. A Star Is Born was meant to be the vehicle that re-established her as a viable movie star, after her humiliating dismissal from MGM in 1950. The public was aware of her personal problems, her fluctuating weight, and her suicide attempt. Now, with our knowledge of Judy Garland’s difficulties in Hollywood, of her missed concert dates, her failed TV program and her tragic, drug-related death, it is impossible not to see the film’s ultimate reflexivity in the way the figure of the unreliable star, the husband, is a surrogate for Garland herself. Each time Vicki Lester ‘‘bails out’’ Norman Maine and ‘‘understands’’ his problems, it is Garland looking at Garland, not James Mason— Garland exposing her own fears and weaknesses through the male character. Made at great expense, over a long shooting schedule, the produc- tion of A Star Is Born was fraught with difficulties that seemed to echo those of Garland. After director George Cukor finished his work, it was decided the film wasn’t musical enough. Cuts were made (and THE STAR WARS SAGA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1142 deplored by Cukor) to permit the inclusion of a long sequence, ‘‘Born in a Trunk,’’ a musical biography of a performer reminiscent of the ‘‘Broadway Melody’’ number in Singin’ in the Rain. Still nervous about the film’s length, the studio, several days after its release (to excellent reviews), cut it from 182 minutes to 154 minutes, hoping it would fit into a more conventional exhibition program. The film was further cut to 135 minutes. The film’s appeal survived its radical surgery. And that appeal is not limited to Garland. Rather, she is not put in relief by the elegant mise-en-scène that exploits with great care the compositional ele- ments mandated by the CinemaScope format, by the lighting and set direction that keep in balance both the film’s intimacy and its grand proportions, by the Harold Arlen score that provided Garland and all subsequent torch singers with the classic ‘‘The Man That Got Away,’’ and by the performance of James Mason, supportive yet stellar in its own right. A Star Is Born is, in fact, a celebration of a dual register of performance—as a function of artifice, technique, audience and as the revelation of personal intimacy captured by the movie camera. The stage that opens and closes the film is the gigantic Shrine Auditorium. It first exposes Norman Maine’s drunken disruption of a charity show. In the final shot, it is the frame for Vicki Lester’s return to her public, performing self, when she receives an ovation for presenting herself as ‘‘Mrs. Norman Maine.’’ The performer’s identity shifts through a series of qualifying frames. Norman falls in love with Vicki (still called Esther Blodgett) when he hears her sing ‘‘The Man That Got Away’’ with and for a small group of musicians. The song is sustained in a camera movement that accommodates her own position as well as her connection to the instrumentalists, the privileged witnesses/collaborators. Norman’s witnessing is, like our own, full of wonder at the talent generated by personality and technique. Norman exhibits his talent at the end of the film, when he ‘‘acts’’ happy and cured just before going out to drown himself. Vicki’s progress to stardom is the occasion for satirical views of the movie industry, episodes familiar from other films but done here with exceptional care and wit. The starlet is literally given the runaround during her first day at the studio, as unceremoniously pushed through a series of departments and doors, only to exit where she entered. No one has really taken the time to find out who she is. That process of Hollywood de-identification is made graphic when the makeup artists examine Vicki’s face, declare it is all wrong, and transform her into a caricatural idea of beauty. During her first screen appearance, the director wants only to see her arm, waving a handker- chief from a departing train. When she finally does become a star she performs her big production number all by herself in her living room, turning the furniture into the ‘‘sets’’ for exotic locales. The varied scope of the star’s identity is most emphatically emblemized in the scene where Vicki Lester receives an Academy Award. Norman drunkenly interrupts the ceremony and accidentaly slaps his wife. This private gesture is exposed before three audiences— the spectators within the fiction, those implied by the presence of the gigantic television screen within the shot, and ourselves. Yet another painful irony of this painful moment is the fact that Judy Garland, expected to win an Oscar for her performance in A Star Is Born, lost to Grace Kelly. —Charles Affron THE STAR WARS SAGA STAR WARS USA, 1977 Director: George Lucas Production: Lucasfilm Productions; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 121 minutes. Released Spring 1977 by 20th Century-Fox. Cost: $10 million. Producer: Gary Kurtz; screenplay: George Lucas; photography: Gilbert Taylor; editors: Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, and Richard Chew; sound: Derek Ball, Don MacDougall, Bob Minkler, and Ray West, sound effects editor: Benjamin Burtt, Jr.; art directors: John Barry, Norman Reynolds, and Leslie Dilley; music: John Williams; special effects: John Dykstra, John Stears, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune, and Robert Blalack; costume designer: John Mallo. Cast: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker); Harrison Ford (Han Solo); Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia Ograna); Alec Guinness (Ben ‘‘Obi- wan’’ Kenobi); Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin); David Prowse (Lord Darth Vader, voice by James Earl Jones); Kenny Baker (R2- D2); Anthony Daniels (C-3PO); Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca). Awards: Oscars for Art Direction/Set Direction, Sound, Best Origi- nal Score, Film Editing, Costume Design, and Visual Effects, 1977; Special Oscar to Ben Burtt, Jr. for sound effects, 1977. Publications Script: Lucas, George, Star Wars: A New Hope, New York, 1999. Books: McConnell, Frank, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images in Film and Literature, New York, 1979. Hunter, Allan, Alec Guinness on Screen, London, 1982. Short, Robert, The Gospel from Outer Space, San Francisco, 1983. Velasco, Raymond L., A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, New York, 1984. Austin, Bruce A., Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics and Law, Volume 1, Norwood, New Jersey, 1985. Von Gunden, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: The Films, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1987. Articles: Strick, Philip, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1976. Filmfacts (Los Angeles), no. 5, 1977. Zito, S., ‘‘George Lucas Goes Far Out,’’ in American Film (Washing- ton, D.C.), April 1977. Murphy, A. D., in Variety (New York), 25 May 1977. THE STAR WARS SAGAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1143 The Star Wars Saga: Star Wars Collins, Robert, ‘‘Star Wars: The Pastiche of Myth and the Yearning for a Past Future,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), Summer 1977. ‘‘Star Wars Issue’’ of American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), July 1977. Canemaker, J., ‘‘Star Wars Special Effects,’’ in Millimeter (New York), July-August 1977. Fok, T. C., and A. Lubow, in Film Comment (New York), July- August 1977. Morris, G., in Take One (Montreal), July-August 1977. Lindberg, I., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Autumn 1977. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘The Solitary Pleasures of Star Wars,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1977. Ciment, Michel, and Robert Benayoun, in Positif (Paris), Septem- ber 1977. Clouzot, C., ‘‘Le Matin du magicien: George Lucas et Star Wars,” in Ecran (Paris), September 1977. Nicholson, D. W., ‘‘Special Effects in Star Wars,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), October 1977. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), December 1977. Le Peron, S., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1977. Wood, Denis, ‘‘The Stars in Our Hearts—A Critical Commentary on George Lucas’s Star Wars,” in Journal of Popular Film (Wash- ington, D.C.), no. 3, 1978. Mathers, F., in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), January 1978. Rubey, D., ‘‘Not So Far Away,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), August 1978. Ulbrich, P., in Film und Fernsehen (East Berlin), August 1978. Tosi, V., in Bianco e Nero (Rome), January-February 1979. Pye, Michael, and Lynda Miles, in Atlantic (Boston), March 1979. Roth, L., ‘‘Bergsonian Comedy and the Human Machine in Star Wars,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Winter 1979. Hirayama, Ruth L., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Wood, Denis, ‘‘The Empire’s New Clothes,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1981. Edwards, Phil, in Starburst (London), March 1982. Lafficier, Randy and Jean-Marc, ‘‘Les Origines de Star Wars,’’ in Ecran Fantastique (Paris), April 1983. Harmetz, Aljean, ‘‘Burden of Dreams: George Lucas,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1983. Chion, M., ‘‘Cinema de rêve,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1983. THE STAR WARS SAGA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1144 Lewis, J., ‘‘A Situationist Perspective,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1985. Malmquist, Allen, ‘‘Saga Time at the 01’ Bijou,’’ in Cinefantastique (Oak Park, Illinois), October 1985. McMahon, D. F., ‘‘The Psychological Significance of Science Fic- tion,’’ in Psychoanalytic Review (New York), no. 2, 1989. Meyer, D. S., ‘‘Star Wars, Star Wars, and American Political Cul- ture,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), no. 2, 1992. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK USA, 1980 Director: Irvin Kershner Production: Lucasfilm; Rank Film Color, 35mm, Panavision, Dolby sound; visual effects shot in Panavision; running time: 124 minutes. Released 14 June 1980 by 20th Century-Fox. Filmed in Elstree Studios, England, and on location in Finse, Norway; special effects shot at Industrial Light and Magic, California. Producer: Gary Kurtz; executive producer: George Lucas; screen- play: Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, from an original story written for the screen by George Lucas; photography: Peter Suschitzy; editor: Paul Hirsch; visual effects editor: Conrad Buff; sound: Peter Sutton; special sound effects: Ben Burtt; production designer: Norman Reynolds; art directors: Leslie Dilley, Harry Lange, and Alan Tomkins; visual effects art director: Joe Johnston; music: John Williams; special effects: Brian Johnson and Richard Edlund; effects photography: Dennis Muren; optical photography: Bruce Nicholson; stop motion animation: Jon Berg and Phil Tippet; costume designer: John Mollo; design consultant: Ralph McQuarrie. Cast: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker); Harrison Ford (Han Solo); Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia); David Prowse (Lord Darth Vader, voice by James Earl Jones); Anthony Daniels (C-3PO); Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca); Kenny Baker (R2-D2); Frank Oz (Voice and mechani- cal workings of Yoda); Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian); Alec Guinness (Ben ‘‘Obi-wan’’ Kenobi). Awards: Oscar for Sound, 1980; Special Achievement Oscar for Visual Effects, 1980. Publications Script: Brackett, Leigh, Lawrence Kasdan, and George Lucas, The Empire Strikes Back: Script Facsimile, Los Angeles, 1998. Books: Arnold, Alan, Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back,’’ New York, 1980. Smith, Thomas G., Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects, New York, 1986. Articles: Brosnan, John, ‘‘Interview with Brian Johnson,’’ in Starburst (Lon- don), no. 26, 1980. ‘‘Empire Strikes Back Dossier,’’ in Ecran Fantastique (Paris), no. 13, 1980. Films and Filming (London), April 1980. McGee, R., in American Film (Washington, D.C.), May 1980. Harwood, J., in Variety (New York), 14 May 1980. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), June 1980. Reiss, D., in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), June 1980. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1980. Vallerand, F., ‘‘John Williams et The Empire Strikes Back,” in Séquences (Montreal), July 1980. Shay, D., ‘‘Interview with Richard Edlund,’’ in Cinefex (Riverside, California), August 1980. Rogers, T., in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1980. Clarke, Frederick S., in Cinefantastique (Oak Park, Illinois), Fall 1980. Ciment, Michel, and A. Garsault, in Positif (Paris), September 1980. Tessier, Max, in Image et Son (Paris), September 1980. Gordon, Andrew, ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back: Monsters from the Id,’’ in Science Fiction Studies, November 1980. Lierop, P., in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1980. Mandrell, P., ‘‘Tauntauns, Walkers, and Probots,’’ in Cinefex (River- side, California), December 1980. Tellez, J. L., in Contracampo (Madrid), December 1980. Termine, L., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), December 1980. Shay, Don, in Ecran Fantastique (Paris), no. 16, 1981. de Kuyper, E., in Skrien (Amsterdam), March 1981. Lancashire, Anne, ‘‘Complex Design in The Empire Strikes Back,” in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1981. Also see list of publications following Star Wars credits. THE RETURN OF THE JEDI USA, 1983 Director: Richard Marquand Production: Lucasfilm Ltd.; color, 35mm, Dolby sound; running time: about 120 minutes. Released Spring 1983 by 20th Century-Fox. Filmed Elstree Studios, England, and on location in Yuma, Arizona and Crescent City, California; special effects shot at Industrial Light and Magic, California. Producer: Howard Kazanjian; executive producer: George Lucas; screenplay: Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, from an original story for the screen by George Lucas; photography: Alan Hume; editors: Sean Barton, Marcia Lucas, and Duwayne Dunham; sound designer: Ben Burtt; production designer: Norman Reynolds; mu- sic: John Williams; special effects: Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston; makeup and creature designers: Stuart Freeborn and Phil Tippett; costume designers: Aggie Guerard Rodgers and Nilo Rodis-Jamero. Cast: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker); Harrison Ford (Han Solo); Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia); Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian); Anthony Daniels (C-3PO); Kenny Baker (R2-D2 and Paploo); Peter THE STAR WARS SAGAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1145 Mayhew (Chewbacca); Ian McDiarmid (The Emperor); David Prowse (Darth Vader, voice by James Earl Jones); Sebastian Shaw (Anakin Skywalker); Warwick Davis (Wicket); Michael Carter (Bib Fortuna); Denis Lawson (Wedge); Alec Guinness (Ben ‘‘Obi-wan’’ Kenobi). Publications Script: Kasdan, Lawrence, and George Lucas, in The Art of ‘‘The Return of the Jedi,’’ New York, 1985. Articles: Variety (New York), 18 May 1983. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), June 1983. Callahan, J., ‘‘Raiders of the Jedi Secret,’’ and ‘‘Jedi’s Extra Special Effects,’’ by Adam Eisenberg, in American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1983. Murdoch, Alan, ‘‘Interview with Richard Marquand,’’ in Starburst (London), June 1983. Solman, G., in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1983. Cohen, P., in Skoop (Amsterdam), July 1983. Crawley, Tony, ‘‘The Making of The Return of the Jedi,” in Starburst (London), July 1983. Edlund, Richard, Dennis Muren, and Ken Ralston, ‘‘Jedi Journal,’’ in Cinefex (Riverside, California), July 1983. Kobal, J., in Films and Filming (London), July 1983. Schupp, P., in Séquences (Montreal), July 1983. Strick, Philip, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1983. Hibbin, S., in Stills (London), July-August 1983. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Ecran Fantastique (Paris), October 1983. Dumont, P., in Cinéma (Paris), October 1983. Philbert, B., in Cinématographe (Paris), October 1983. Marinero, P., in Casablanca (Madrid), January 1984. Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Winter 1984. Lewis, Jon, in Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1985. Starburst (London), May 1986. Also see list of publications following Star Wars credits. THE PHANTOM MENACE USA, 1999 Director: George Lucas Production: Lucasfilm; 35mm, Arriscope, color (Deluxe), Dolby Sound; running time, 136 minutes. Released 19 May 1999, USA; filmed in Tozeur, Tunisia, Royal Palace, Caserta, Naples, Italy, and Elstree Studios, Leavesden, England; special effects created at Indus- trial Light and Magic, California. Cost: $115 million. Producer: Rick McCallum; executive producer: George Lucas; screenplay: George Lucas; photography: David Tattershall; edi- tors: Ben Burtt and Paul Martin Smith; special effects: Rob Cole- man, John Knoll, Dennis Muren, Scott Squires; original music and conductor: John Williams; production designer: Gavin Bocquet; costume design: Trisha Biggar. Cast: Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn); Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi); Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala/Padmé Naberrie); Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker); Ian McDiarmid (Naboo Senator Cos Palpatine/Darth Sidious); Pernilla August (Schmi Skywalker); Oliver Ford Davies (Governor Sio Bibble); Hugh Quarshie (Captain Panaka); Ahmed Best (voice of Jar Jar Binks/Senator); Anthony Daniels (C- 3PO); Kenny Baker (R2-D2); Frank Oz (voice of Yoda); Terence Stamp (Chancellor Finis Valorum); Brian Blessed (Boss Nass); Andrew Secombe (Watto); Ray Park (Darth Maul). Awards: Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards, Sierra Award for Best Costume Design (Trisha Biggar), 2000; Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor (Jar-Jar Binks), 2000; Young Artist Award for Best Performance by a Young Actor in a Drama Film (Jake Lloyd), 2000. Publications: Script: Lucas, George, Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace: Script Facsimile, Los Angeles, 2000. Books: Pollock, Dale, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, New York, 1999. Cavelos, Jeanne, The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist’s Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films, New York, 1999. Anderson, Kevin J., and Daniel Wallace, Star Wars: The Essential Chronology, Los Angeles, 2000. Articles: Blake, Larry, ‘‘Finishing The Phantom Menace—The Complete Post-Production for Star Wars Episode I,’’ in Mix (Berkeley), 1 May 1999. French, Lawrence, ‘‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,’’ in Cinefantastique (New York), 1 May 1999. McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Mighty Effects but Mini Magic,’’ in Variety (New York), 17 May 1999. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘The Phantom Movie,’’ in Time (New York), 17 May 1999. Gleiberman, Owen, ‘‘Force of Nature?’’ in Entertainment Weekly (New York), 21 May 1999. ‘‘The Second Coming,’’ in Maclean’s (Toronto), 24 May 1999. ‘‘Star Wars: A New Hype,’’ in Film Review (London), 1 June 1999. Robertson, Barbara, ‘‘Star Wars,’’ in Computer Graphics World (San Francisco), 1 June 1999. Travers, Peter, ‘‘Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace,’’ in Rolling Stone (New York), 10 June 1999. Duncan, Jody, Kevin H. Martin, and Mark Cotta Vaz, ‘‘Heroes’ Journey,’’ in Cinefex (Riverside), 1 July 1999. Romney, Jonathan, ‘‘Cause and Effects,’’ in New Statesman (Lon- don), 12 July 1999. Alleva, Richard, ‘‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,’’ in Common- weal (New York), 16 July 1999. Steyn, Mark, ‘‘Cinema: Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace,’’ in The Spectator (London), 17 July 1999. THE STAR WARS SAGA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1146 Robertson, Barbara, ‘‘Behind the Screens,’’ in Computer Graphics World (San Francisco), 1 August 1999. Freer, Ian, review in Empire (London), August 1999. Doherty, Thomas, ‘‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,’’ in Cinefantastique, 1 October 1999. Carson, Tom, ‘‘The Screen,’’ in Esquire (New York), 1 Novem- ber 1999. *** In terms of scope, the Star Wars films are a modern equivalent to The Iliad or The Odyssey. Not only do they depict a mythic history in the form of an epic narrative, they also tell a personal tale of courage and cowardice, adventure and romance. Supported by a dazzling display of special effects and cinematic technology, the films are set in a vivid fantasy world, ‘‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.’’ The series is so popular that each new film has joined the ranks of the top moneymakers of all time. More importantly, the early films generated a demand for big-budget science fiction and fantasy films, a demand that has continued into the 1990s and beyond. The Disneyesque creator behind the films is George Lucas, who used the success of American Graffiti as a springboard for the production of the first Star Wars film, subtitled A New Hope. Lucas retained the rights to future Star Wars films and produced two sequels in the 1980s, subtitled The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. These three films are the middle trilogy of a tentatively planned nine film opus. The fourth film to be made, The Phantom Menace, which appeared in 1999, begins the sequence, and Lucas has plans to make its two sequels within ten years. The middle trilogy relates the adventures of Luke Skywalker as he and his companions battle the evil Empire, led by Luke’s archnemesis, Lord Darth Vader, who is actually the tool of the Emperor, a far more malevolent being. As they’re now planned, the first trilogy will relate how the Emperor took power and will end with Luke as a young boy, while the third trilogy will begin years after Luke and his rebel allies have defeated the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. The first three films to be made are full of youthful energy, from the exuberance of the performers to the powerful but subtle strains of John Williams’s Academy Award-winning score. Lucas may be the genius behind these films, but the contributions of others involved in the films should not be overlooked. Although the series as a whole can be seen as a simple tale of good versus evil, this doesn’t do justice to its moral complexity, which is particularly in evidence in the middle trilogy through the character of Luke. Luke’s story is not only a fight against the evil Empire, it is also a fight against the evil within himself. His moral dilemma is compli- cated by the fact, as revealed in The Empire Strikes Back, that the villainous Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Luke’s confrontation with his dark father is part of his initiation as a Jedi Knight, an initiation which involves training in the ways of ‘‘the Force,’’ the mysterious power that exists in everything and ‘‘binds the universe together.’’ An important theme in the films is how the Force can be used to control technology, for good or evil ends. Luke’s initiation into this mysterious Force is a rite of passage. As such, aspects of his story conform to the classic structure of separation, transition and incorporation described by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book Rites of Passage. For example, in The Empire Strikes Back Luke’s right hand is cut off by his father during a fight and is later replaced with a mechanical hand. Despite this symbolic castration, Luke still sees goodness in his father, and in Return of the Jedi he spares his father’s life when he sees that his father, who has become more machine than man, also has a mechani- cal hand. This device of the hands signifies a permanent separation that leads to a permanent incorporation—it is a symbol of union with the father and a mark of membership in the knighthood of the Jedi. As a result, Luke becomes a Jedi Knight and his father is again incorpo- rated into the good side of the Force. The duplication and inversion which exists in the confrontation between Luke and his father is reflected throughout the three early Star Wars films. For instance, the rebels must destroy two Death Stars, Luke has a twin sister, the two robots are a comical inversion of the courage and cowardice of the other main characters, and Obi-wan Kenobi is a benevolent double of the Emperor. Most importantly, the furry Ewoks of Return of the Jedi are an inverted duplication of the small, nasty Jawas of A New Hope. The primitive technology of the Ewoks is the crucial factor that defeats the more advanced technology of the Empire. The Ewoks thus demonstrate how the Emperor’s inflated sense of power has caused him to minimize the powers of others resulting in the Emperor’s own downfall. In this respect, the communal celebration of all of the heroes at the forest home of the Ewoks in the final scene of Return of the Jedi represents an interesting development of the theme of duplication and inversion because it demonstrates the process whereby two can become one. Ultimately, the trilogy not only proclaims the unity of Luke with his father or Luke with his sister, it also proclaims the unity of the Many with the One. The spirit of togetherness at the end illustrates the essential oneness of the individual and the group. The Emperor loses because he ignores the symbiotic nature of all such dualities; he fails to realize that the existence of the master depends on the existence of his servant. And the power of Luke as a mythic hero is his ability to transcend the distinctions between good and evil, to see the good within the bad and the human being behind the mechanical mask. With their combination of fantastical settings, spectacular special effects and slick action sequences, it is little wonder that these three films captured the imagination of a generation of filmgoers. It was with intense anticipation, then, that early in 1999 fans awaited the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Lucas’s first directorial project since A New Hope in 1977. So tense was the build-up that bootleg copies of the film, taken on camcorders at preview screenings, circulated on the internet months in advance, and when the release date became known, fans camped outside cinemas to buy advance tickets. Some cinemas even reported fans buying cinema tickets just to watch the Phantom Menace trailer. Set thirty years before the original three-film sequence, in The Phantom Menace two Jedi knights set out to rescue Queen Amidala from the planet Naboo, and become involved in a battle with the Dark Side to prevent the Empire taking over the galaxy. The Phantom Menace did not disappoint in terms of its special effects, its battle scenes, or its action set pieces. Yet the film has been criticized on many fronts, including its lack of humor and clear story line, poor dialogue, and the apparent lack of directorial guidance in the perform- ances of the actors. It has been suggested that Lucas has become so involved with the saga that he is no longer able to judge where audiences need help working out the details of the plot. A less charitable view is that he no longer needs to make an effort in order to make money. Nevertheless, many critics look towards the next two films, due out in 2002 and 2005, to make sense of The Phantom Menace. Despite the failings of the latest film, it is inevitable that the next two episodes will be at least STARé POVESTI CESKéFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1147 as successful at the box office as the others. While the overall concept may have the cultural weight of an Iliad or Odyssey, The Phantom Menace exposes serious narrative limitations in the execution of this modern saga. —Thomas Snyder, updated by Chris Routledge STARé POVESTI CESKé (Old Czech Legends) Czechoslovakia, 1953 Director: Ji?í Trnka Production: Puppet Film Prague; color, animated puppets, 35mm; length: 2,480 meters. Released September 1953, Prague. Filmed 1953. Producers: Vladimír Janovsky, Vojen Masník, and Jaroslav Mo?i?; story: Ji?í Trnka and Milos Kratochvíl; screenplay: Ji?í Trnka and Ji?í Brde?ka, from the book by Alois Jirásek; photography: Ludvík Hájek and Emanuel Franek; editor: Helena Lebdu?ková; sound: Emanuel Formánek, Emil Poledník and Josef Zavadil; music: Václav Trojan; consultants: Rudolf Turek and Albert Pek; animation: B?etislav Pojar, Bohuslav Srámek, Zdeněk Hrabě, Stanislav Látal, Jan Karpa?, Josef Kluge, and Franti?ek Braun. Cast: (Voices) Ru?ena Nasková; Václav Vydra, Sr.; Karel H?ger; Zdeněk Stěpánek; Eduard Kohout. Awards: Venice Film Festival, Silver Medal from the president of the Festival, Lion of St. Mark, and Honorable Mention for Short Films, 1953; Locarno Festival, Prize of the Swiss Film Press, 1953. Publications Books: Bo?ek, Jaroslav, Ji?í Trnka, Artist and Puppet Master, Prague, 1963. Bene?ová, Marie, Ji?í Trnka, Prague, 1970. Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Habova, Milada, and Jitka Vysekalova, editors, Czechoslovak Cin- ema, Prague, 1982. Articles: Bro?, J., ‘‘The Puppet Film as Art,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 5–6, 1955. Bro?, J., ‘‘An Interview with the Puppet-Film Director, Ji?í Trnka,’’ in Film (London), January-February 1956. Orna, Bernard, ‘‘Trnka’s Little Men,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), November 1956. Polt, Harriet, ‘‘The Czechoslovak Animated Film’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1964. Bo?ek, Jaroslav, in Film a Doba (Prague), no. 5, 1965. ‘‘Trnkaland,’’ in Newsweek (New York), March 1966. Fiala, Milo?, in Film a Doba (Prague), no. 4, 1970. Schepelern, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Summer 1978. *** After exhausting work on a long puppet film, Bajaja, Trnka gathered his creative strength for another ambitious enterprise, to transpose into the form of a puppet movie the ‘‘Legends of Old Bohemia,’’ a collection of narratives about the oldest period of Czech history, in which history is mixed with mythology. It was not a simple task and doubts appeared from the very beginning. However, Trnka was convinced that puppets were most suitable for expressing the magic as well as the solemnity of old stories and myths. From the book by Alois Jirásek, who had shaped these legends according to old chronicles and records (the book was published in 1894), he selected six stories: the arrival of First Father (Patriarch) Czech in the territory of contemporary Bohemia; the legend about the strong Bivoj; the legend of Pr?emysl the Ploughman, founder of the royal dynasty of Pr?emyslites reigning in Bohemia until the 15th century; the story of the Young Women’s War; about Horymír who stood up to defend the farmers’ labor; and the legend of the Lucko War which is won by Cestmír, a hero of the people. Trnka did not restrict himself exclu- sively to Jirásek’s conception; while planning the screenplay, he took into consideration the most recent archaeological research which helped him interpret the probable material and cultural conditions of life in those days. However, Jirásek’s text, together with the archaeo- logical research, was, for Trnka, merely a foundation on which he built a structure according to his own imagination and invention. From the point of view of Trnka’s creative career, Old Czech Legends represents a fundamental metamorphosis in his work. This change was manifested most expressively in the puppets themselves. In comparison with Spalíc?ek, The Emperor’s Nightingale, and Bajaja, whose common trait was fragility and charm, the puppets in the Legends are monumentally dramatic and tragic, more individualized; their countenance expresses their character, the inner essence of the represented person. Another radical innovation was the breaking of unity between the music and the picture because, in this film, Trnka’s puppets speak for the first time. Václav Trojan’s music does not lose its importance but it is incorporated into the overall sound design including dialogue and sound effects. The stories in Old Czech Legends combine to form a total composition. The majestic arrival of Patriarch Czech is followed by the struggle of Bivoj with a wild boar; the epic about Pr?emysl has lyrical passages, the Young Women’s War a capricious, almost erotic mood. The dramatic narrative about Horymír is remarkable for its crowd scenes and its conclusion in which Horymír jumps over the Moldau River. The most remarkable is probably the last episode of the Legends, the narrative about the cowardly Duke Neklan, who must be replaced in the war by a people’s hero, Cestmír. The characterization of Neklan pushes the puppet movie to its farthest limits in expressing psychological attitudes. In his monograph about Trnka, Jaroslav Bo?ek describes it as an extraordinary study of cowardice which we can only rarely find even in a movie with human actors. The second part of the story—Cestmír’s battle with the Lukanians—is remarkable from another point of view. Trnka used from 70 to 100 puppets in battle scenes. Control of such a multitude of inanimate actors was, from the artistic and technical standpoint, an STEAMBOAT WILLIE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1148 unusually demanding task, unthinkable in a puppet movie until then. Moreover, Trnka found, jointly with his animators, the precise shade of dramatic mood and rhythm, so that the movements of the crowd were harmonious. The Legends occupy an important place in Trnka’s extensive work. Trnka discovered here a new style of puppet movie, character- ized by a transition from lyricism to drama and by the depiction of an individualized, psychologically conditioned hero. That this new style had the potential for further development was demonstrated by Trnka’s subsequent puppet movies The Good Soldier Svejk and The Dream of the Night of St. John. —B. Urgosíková STEAMBOAT WILLIE USA, 1928 Director: Walt Disney Production: Walt Disney Productions; black and white, 35mm, animation; length: 500 feet. Released 18 November 1928 in New York. Filmed in California. Producers: Roy Disney and Walt Disney; scenario: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks; sound recordist: P. A. Powers; music: Carl Stalling; animation supervisor: Ub Iwerks; animation: Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, and Johnny Cannon. Cast: Character voices by Walt Disney. Publications Books: Field, Robert D., The Art of Walt Disney, New York, 1942. Manvell, Roger, and J. Huntley, The Technique of Film Music, New York, 1957. Miller, Diane Disney, The Story of Walt Disney, edited by Pete Martin, New York, 1957. Stephenson, Ralph, Animation in the Cinema, New York, 1967. Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney, New York, 1968; revised edition, London, 1986. Bessy, Maurice, Walt Disney, Paris, 1970. Kurland, Gerald, Walt Disney: The Master of Animation, Charlottes- ville, Virginia, 1971. Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney, from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms, New York, 1973. Sklar, Robert, Movie Made America: A Social History of American Movies, New York, 1975. Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney: An American Original, New York, 1976. Leebron, Elizabeth, and Lynn Gartley, Walt Disney: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Maltin, Leonard, Of Mice and Magic, New York, 1980. Peary, Gerald and Danny, editors, The American Animated Cartoon, New York, 1980. Crafton, Donald, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, New York, 1982. Bruno, Eduardo, and Enrico Ghezzi, Walt Disney, Venice, 1985. Mosley, Leonard, Disney’s World: A Biography, New York, 1985; as The Real Walt Disney, London, 1986. Culhane, Shamus, Talking Animals and Other People, New York, 1986. Grant, John, Encyclopaedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, New York, 1987; revised edition, 1998. Abrams, Robert E., contributor, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, New York, 1992. Thomas, Bob, Building a Company: Roy O. Disney & the Creation of an Entertainment Empire, New York, 1998. Smith, Dave, Disney A to Z: The Updated Official Encyclopedia, New York, 1999. Solomon, Charles, The Art of Disney, New York, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 21 November 1928. ‘‘Making of a Sound Fable,’’ in Popular Mechanics, Summer 1930. ‘‘Mickey Mouse’s Miraculous Movie Monkeyshines,’’ in Literary Digest (New York), 9 August 1930. Carr, Harry, ‘‘The Only Unpaid Movie Star,’’ in American, March 1931. Mann, Arthur, ‘‘Mickey Mouse’s Financial Career,’’ in Harper’s (New York), March 1931. Seldes, Gilbert, ‘‘Walt Disney,’’ in New Yorker, 19 December 1931. ‘‘Profound Mouse,’’ in Time (New York), 15 May 1933. Hollister, P., ‘‘Walt Disney: Genius at Work,’’ in Atlantic (Boston), December 1940. Ericsson, Peter, ‘‘Walt Disney,’’ in Sequence (London), no. 10, 1950. ‘‘A Silver Anniversary for Walt and Mickey,’’ in Life (New York), 2 November 1953. Time (New York), 27 December 1954. Manvell, Roger, ‘‘Giving Life to the Fantastic: A History of the Cartoon Film,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1956. Poncet, Marie-Therese, ‘‘Walt Disney de Mickey à Disneyland,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 2, Paris, 1968. Armes, Roy, ‘‘Disney and Animation,’’ in Film and Reality, Lon- don, 1974. Brody, M., ‘‘The Wonderful World of Disney: Its Psychological Appeal,’’ in American Image (Detroit), no. 4, 1976. Canemaker, J., ‘‘Disney Animation: History and Technique,’’ in Film News (New York), January-February 1979. Canemaker, J., ‘‘Disney Design 1928–1979,’’ in Millimeter (New York), February 1979. Barrier, M., ‘‘Building a Better Mouse! 50 Years of Disney Anima- tion,’’ in Funnyworld (New York), Summer 1979. *** Steamboat Willie—starring the most famous of cartoon mice, Mickey—has the distinction of being the very first sound cartoon. While that feat may not seem so remarkable in the context of modern sound technology, by 1928 standards it was a bold and potentially STERNEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1149 disastrous step on the part of Walt Disney. Not only was early equipment difficult and cumbersome to use, but Disney had to decide what cartoons should sound like. Since cartoons are totally fabricated, it was feared that sound might bring too much reality into play and shatter the illusion of make-believe. Luckily, Disney took a very logical (and correct) approach by using silly and bizarre sounds to match the characters and situations in his cartoons. Up to this point Walt Disney’s career was fairly active, but not secure. His Alice series had not been a profitable venture, and he lost the rights to the Oswald Rabbit character to his former partner Charles Mintz. In 1928 Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks developed a new character named Mickey Mouse. They made two cartoons with Mickey, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho, but Disney was unable to find a distributor for the films. At this point Disney knew he had to find something unique to make his films stand out from all the others. He decided to take a risk by adding a musical soundtrack to his cartoon. The most difficult aspect of making Steamboat Willie was the synchronization of picture and sound. For this reason, dialogue was kept to a bare minimum (with Walt Disney himself supplying the voices of his characters). The music for the cartoon was planned, although not scored, before any of the animation was begun. Since music can be broken down mathematically, the animation was drawn to follow a musical pattern. For example, if the music had two beats per second, the animation would hit a beat every 12 frames (based on 24 frames per second). The last half of Steamboat Willie contains several excellent examples of the synchronization of action to music. In this sequence Mickey and Minnie play a version of ‘‘Turkey in the Straw’’ using barnyard animals as instruments. The early Mickey Mouse was a bit more crude than the sweet and lovable creature he eventually became. In this cartoon he pulls on a cow’s udders, stretches a cat’s tail, throws a mother pig and her babies across the room, and plays a cow’s teeth like a xylophone. All of these actions fit into the beat of the music. Because the synchronization between picture and sound was so important, Disney knew that his recording should use the sound-on- film method rather than disc. In 1928 sound equipment was at a premium in Los Angeles, so Disney took his film to New York. The first attempt to record the soundtrack was not to his satisfaction, and Disney sold his car to finance a second attempt. His confidence in the project paid off. Steamboat Willie was a tremendous success and received terrific reviews. What started out as a novelty—the first sound-on-film cartoon—became the standard of cartoons to follow. —Linda J. Obalil STERNE (Stars) Bulgaria-East Germany, 1959 Director: Konrad Wolf Production: DEFA (Berlin) and Studiya za igralni filmi (Sofia); black and white, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes; length: 2,513 meters. Released March 1959, Berlin and Sofia. Filmed 1958 in Bulgaria. Screenplay: Anzhel Wagenstein; co-director: Rangel Vulchanov; photography: Werner Bergmann; editor: Christina Wernicke; sound: Erich Schmidt; production designer: Jose Sancha; music: Simeon Pironkov; costume designer: Albert Seidner. Cast: Sasha Krusharska (Ruth); Jürgen Frohriep (Walter); Erik S. Klein (Kurt); Stefan Peichev (Uncle Petko); Georgi Naumov (Blazhe); Ivan Kondov (Ruth’s father); Milka Tuikova (Police officer); Stiliyan Kanev (The ‘‘Doctor’’); Naicho Petrov (Police officer); Elena Hranova (Old Jewish woman); Albert Zahn (Soldier on duty); Hannjo Hasse (Captain); Hans Fiebrandt (Soldier); Tsonka Miteva (Mutsi); Waltraut Kramm (Mutsi’s girlfriend); Trifon Dzhonev (Schmied); Leo Konforti (The nervous Jew); Gani Staikov (Feverish person); Avram Pinkas (Water carrier); Luna Davidova (Pregnant Jew); Petar Vasilev (Jewish merchant); Milka Mandil (Jewish merchant); Marin Toshev (Jew with cigarettes); Bella Eschkenazy (Jew with girl); Kancho Boshnakov (Greedy Jew); Georgi Banchev (Woodcutter); Yuri Yakovlev (Soldier at the station). Awards: Cannes Film Festival, Special Jury Prize, 1959; Edinburgh Film Festival, First Prize and Honorary Diploma, 1959. Publications Books: Cervoni, Albert, Les Ecrans de Sofia, Paris, 1976. Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Gregor, Ulrich, Geschichte des Films ab 1960, Frankfurt, 1978. Wolf, Konrad, Direkt in Kopf und Herz: Aufzeichnungen, Reden, Interviews, Berlin, 1989. Wolf, Markus, Die Troika, Düsseldorf, 1989. Articles: Tok, Hans-Dieter, ‘‘Konrad Wolf,’’ in Regiestuhle, Berlin, 1972. Gehler, Fred, in Film und Fernsehen (East Berlin), no. 4, 1986. Schwalbe, K., ‘‘Sterne,’’ in Beitr?ge zur Film und Fernsehwissenschaft, vol. 31, no. 39, 1990. Hoberman, J., in Village Voice (New York), vol. 43, 13 January 1998. *** The lights and shadows of the Nazi night understandably domi- nated the cinemas of the East European socialist countries for almost two decades after the end of World War II before melting away, slowly and painfully, from memory into history. Sterne was made at that particular point when the schematic black and white ‘‘bad German’’ mode of depiction had already been recognised as artisti- cally insufficient, but the new perception of human conflicts and contradictions in a complicated world, sparked by the Italian neo- realism, had yet to gain prominence. STERNE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1150 Sterne Though both Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic had produced their own films on similar themes and of equal quality (On The Little Island—1958, Lesson One—1960, and And We Were Young—1961, in Bulgaria; and Stronger Than the Night—1954, Betrayed Until the Last Day—1957, They Called Him Amigo—1959 and Naked Among Wolves—1962, in the GDR), it was Sterne that introduced the cinemas of the two countries to the international film scene, where the Polish school and the Soviet ‘‘thaw’’ in the mid 1950s had already stirred the attention and dispersed the bias towards the cinema of the socialist countries. Much later Albert Cervoni in his Les Ecrans de Sofia (Paris, 1976) called the film ‘‘a masterpiece or a little less than that, but certainly a moving work where—rather uncustomarily—the formula of the co-production was justified on all levels, political, esthetic and also that of the screenplay itself.’’ He stated this in part to cast a passing remark at the Quai d’Orsay, the French ministry of external affairs, for which the GDR did not exist in 1959. For this reason Sterne was shown at Cannes only as a Bulgarian entry. There was a shared tragic national experience behind the co-production; the Kingdom of Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich from 1940 to 1944, yet managed through firm resistance to save its Jews from extermination. A personal friendship was also involved as screenwriter Anzhel Wagenstein, a Bulgarian Jew and a member of a resistance unit, and director Konrad Wolf, son of exiled Communist writer Friedrich Wolf and an officer in the Red army, studied together at Moscow’s VGIK in the early fifties. The story of the disillusioned Aryan Unteroffizier who falls in love with the girl from the doomed transport of Greek Jews and tries to save her could have easily turned into melodrama but for its authentic- ity and sharpness, imbued with elegiac overtones. Starting with its title (the stars are twinkling witnesses of the lovers, and also humiliat- ing yellow signs of racial Minderwertigkeit), the film attempts to blend poetic dreams with grim reality. The poetic side is less successful partly because of the somewhat old-fashioned and artifi- cial cinematographic means that are applied, but mostly because of the inherent intellectual approach seeking—unlike Hiroshima, mon amour which is structured as an emotional, unpredictable and uncon- trollable response to war traumas—a rational explanation for what seems an absurd and inevitable one-way situation. Highly realistic in its sight and sound, the film’s images remain in one’s mind: the small and quiet Bulgarian town, the yard of the school turned temporarily into a camp, the people behind the barbed wire and their eyes that keep looking out. Eyes that bring to mind the final sequence of LA STRADAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1151 Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism; eyes that seem to have seen death at the end of the tunnel and are trying, hopelessly, to hide it. —Dimitar Bardarsky STORM OVER ASIA See POTOMOK CHINGIS-KHAN THE STORY OF ASIA KLIACHINA WHO LOVED BUT DIDN’T GET MARRIED See ISTORIA ASI KLIACHINOI KOTORAIA LUBILA DA NIE VYSHLA ZAMUZH THE STORY OF G?STA BERLINGS See G?STA BERLINGS SAGA THE STORY OF QIU JU See QIU JU DA GUANSI STORY OF THE LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS See ZANGIKU MONOGATARI LA STRADA (The Road) Italy, 1954 Director: Federico Fellini Production: Ponti-De Laurentiis (Rome); black and white, 35mm; running time: 102 minutes, some sources state 107 minutes or 94 minutes; length: about 2,800 meters. Released 1954, Venice Film Festival. Filmed December 1953-May 1954 in Ponti-De Laurentiis studios in Rome; also on location in Viterbo, Ovindoli, Bagnoregio, and in various small towns in Central and Southern Italy. Producers: Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis; screenplay: Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli with Ennio Flaiano; photography: Otello Martelli; editor: Léo Catozzo; sound engineer: A. Calpini; produc- tion designer: M. Ravesco, with artistic collaboration by Brunello Rondi, assisted by: Paolo Nuzzi; music: Nino Rota; special effects: E. Trani; costume designer: M. Marinari. Cast: Giulietta Masina (Gelsomina); Anthony Quinn (Zampano); Richard Basehart (Il matto, ‘‘the fool’’); Aldo Silvani (Monsieur Giraffa); Marcella Rovere (The widow); Lina Venturini (The sister). Awards: Venice Film Festival, Silver Prize, 1954; New York Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, 1956; Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 1956. Publications Script: Fellini, Federico, and Tullio Pinelli, La strada, in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), September-October 1954; also published in Il primo Fellini, Bologna, 1969; translated as La Stada, edited by Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987. Books: Renzi, Renzo, Federico Fellini, Parma, 1956. Budgen, Suzanne, Fellini, London, 1966. Salachas, Gilbert, Federico Fellini: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, New York, 1969. Silke, James R., Federico Fellini: Discussion, Beverly Hills, 1970. Samuels, Charles Thomas, Encountering Directors, New York, 1972. Pecori, Franco, Federico Fellini, Florence, 1974. Betti, Liliana, Fellini, Zurich, 1976. Ketcham, Charles B., Federico Fellini: The Search for a New Mythology, New York, 1976. Murray, Edward, Fellini the Artist, New York, 1976; revised edi- tion, 1985. Rosenthal, Stuart, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, London, 1976. Fellini, Federico, Fellini on Fellini, edited by Christian Strich, New York, 1976. Stubbs, John C., Federico Fellini: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1978. Alpert, Hollis, Fellini: A Life, New York, 1981; 1998. Costello, Donald P., Fellini’s Road, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1983. Grazzini, Giovanni, editor, Federico Fellini: Intervista sul cinema, Rome, 1983. Burke, Frank, Federico Fellini: Variety Lights to La Dolce Vita, Boston, 1984. Chandler, Charlotte, The Ultimate Seduction, New York, 1984. LA STRADA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1152 La strada Fava, Claudio F., and Aldo Vigano, The Films of Federico Fellini, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. Kezich, Tullio, Fellini, Milan, 1987. Baxter, John, Fellini, New York, 1994. Costantini, Costanzo, editor, Fellini on Fellini, translated by Sohrab Sorooshian, London, 1995. Gieri, Manuela, Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion: Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation, Toronto, 1995. Fellini, Federico, Fellini on Fellini, translated by Isabel Quigley, New York, 1996. Articles: Martini, Stelio, in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), 1 November 1953. ‘‘La Strada Issue’’ of Cinema (Rome), 10 August 1954. Bruno, Eduardo, in Filmcritica (Rome), August-September 1954. Koval, Francis, ‘‘Venice 1954,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1954. Aristarco, Guido, in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), 10 November 1954. Benayoun, Robert, in Positif (Paris), no. 1, 1955. Mangini, Celia, in Cinéma (Paris), January 1955. Lambert, Gavin, in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1955. Bazin, André, in Esprit (Paris), May 1955. L’Her, Yves, in Téléciné (Paris), May-June 1955. Aubier, Dominique, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July 1955. Chardère, Bernard, in Positif (Paris), November 1955. ‘‘New Names,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955. de Laurot, Edouard, ‘‘La Strada—A Poem on Saintly Folly,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 1, 1956. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Peut-on parler du néo-surréalisme de Fellini?’’ in Image et Son (Paris), January 1956. Newsweek (New York), 16 July 1956. Weiler, A. H., in New York Times, 17 July 1956. Young, Vernon, ‘‘La Strada: Cinematic Intersections,’’ in Hudson Review (Nutley, New Jersey), Autumn 1956. Reichley, James, in New Republic (New York), 31 December 1956. Del Fra, Lino, ‘‘A proposito di Fellini,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), June 1957. Bluestone, George, ‘‘An Interview with Federico Fellini,’’ in Film Culture (New York), October 1957. LA STRADAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1153 Lane, John Francis, ‘‘No Road Back,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October 1957. Aristarco, Guido, in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), December 1959. Gauthier, Guy, in Image et Son (Paris), Summer 1962. Taylor, John Russell, in Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, New York, 1964. Harcourt, Peter, ‘‘The Secret Life of Federico Fellini,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1966. Boffa, Franco, ‘‘La splendida automaniera di Fellini,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), April 1966. Eason, Patricia, ‘‘Notes on Double Structure and the Films of Fellini,’’ in Cinema (London), March 1969. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. ‘‘La Strada Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), April 1970. Rizzo, Eugene, ‘‘Fellini’s Musical Alter Ego, Nino Rota: How They Work,’’ in Variety (New York), 21 May 1975. Gili, J. A., in Image et Son (Paris), January 1981. Guajardo, J. M., in Contracampo (Madrid), February 1981. Taconet, C., in Cinéma (Paris), February 1981. Rjasanov, E., in Film und Fernsehen (East Berlin), March 1985. ‘‘Fellini Section’’ of Cinématographe (Paris), January 1986. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 6, 1991. Pinkerton, R.N., ‘‘La Strada: Look Down That Lonesome Road,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 203, May 1992. Scorsese, Martin, ‘‘Film View: Amid Clowns and Brutes, Fellini Found the Divine,’’ in New York Times, 24 October 1993. Landrot, Marine, ‘‘Gelsomina mia/La Strada,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2348, 11 January 1995. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘Propositions pour un portrait du jeune Fellini en néo-réaliste,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 413–414, July- August 1995. *** La strada, one of the true masterpieces of modern cinema, is the film which brought international acclaim to director Federico Fellini. It is also an important transitional work in Italian cinema because its poetic and lyrical qualities set it apart from the literalness of the neo- realism school which had dominated post-World War II Italy. Fellini is an exponent of neo-realism, having apprenticed with Roberto Rossellini as a writer and assistant director on Open City and Paisan. However, when he began directing on his own, preceding La strada with The White Sheik and I vitelloni, he opted for a subjectivity which, while evidencing the influences of neo-realism, resulted in an interior and personalized cinema second only to Bu?uel. One of the recurring motifs in Fellini’s films is the circus. As a youth, Fellini had spent a number of years with an itinerant circus troup and came to admire their simplicity and their affinity with nature. Other motifs center on his Franciscan-like religious beliefs of which he stated: ‘‘If one is to understand Christianity as an attitude of love towards another human being, then all my films revolve around it. I show a world without love inhabited by people who exploit other people, but there is always among them some significant person who wants to give love and to live for the sake of love.’’ Both elements can be found in La strada, where a simple story involving the theme of redemption is set among itinerant circus folk. Fellini wrote La strada (with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano) for his actress-wife Giulietta Masina. When he presented the project to producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, they rejected it as uncommercial, then suggested filming it with Silvano Mangano (Mrs. De Laurentiis) and Burt Lancaster as the stars. Fellini insisted that only his wife would play Gelsomina, and was finally able to convince Anthony Quinn, then in Italy making Attila, the Hun, to accept the role of Zampano. His producers acquiesced and the project was underway. La strada is a serio-comic tragedy in which Fellini presents many levels of emotion and contrasting images. Its abiding message is that everyone has a purpose in life, a philosophy manifested through the lives of the three leading characters. Gelsomina is the self-sacrificing, doe-eyed simpleton (love) who becomes the chattel of Zampano, the animalistic circus strong-man (brutality). The catalyst in their fatal relationship is Il Matto, the Fool, whose prescience helps the ignorant Gelsomina to see her own value as a human being (imagination). On one level the story is a fable, a variation on Beauty and the Beast, with Gelsomina, whose beauty is within, loving the beast. On another level it is a religious allegory in which the Fool, says Fellini, represents Christ. It is also an unprepossessing story of life’s rejects, for whom Fellini has always shown compassion, struggling with their own solitude. This juxtaposition of realism, fantasy and spirituality makes Fellini’s La strada unique. As defined by the title, La strada, or The Road, is an episodic journey in the lives of these three outcasts. Zampano travels from village to village with his motorcycle and three-wheeled trailer performing a strongman’s feat of breaking an iron chain by expanding his muscular chest. His act requires a helpmate so he purchases Gelsomina from her destitute mother for 10,000 lire. (Zampano’s former helpmate had been Gelsomina’s sister who had died on the road.) Gelsomina becomes Zampano’s slave. With much difficulty she learns to beat a drum, announce his act—‘‘Zam-pan-o is here’’—, play the trumpet, and fulfill his sexual needs. Zampano lives in a world of physical appetites, while Gelsomina communicates with the sea, the birds, the flowers. For a while they join a travelling circus where Il Matto, the equilibrist, taunts the brutish Zampano, and counsels Gelsomina in the spiritual. After leaving the circus, their paths once again cross with that of Il Matto. This time when the Fool derides the strongman, Zampano accidently kills him. The Fool’s death sends Gelsomina into a state of depression and Zampano selfishly deserts her. Five years later he learns that she has died and only then, through her loss, is he able to recognize his remorse and the magnitude of his own solitude. Fellini closes his film with a chilling scene by the sea where Gelsomina had always felt at home. The impact of the film is the result of Fellini’s poetic imagery and not any cinematic tricks. The most apparent cinematic device is the moving camera and beautiful photography of Otello Martelli. Nino Rota’s enchanting musical score has since become an international classic. Most important to the effectiveness of the film is the acting. Quinn’s performance as Zampano is superb and brought him long overdue acclaim as an actor of stature, and Basehart is a commend- able and mischievous Il Matto. Most outstanding of all is the wonderful face and pantomime of Giulietta Masina whose comedic abilities were compared to those of Chaplin and Harry Langdon. The majority of reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with the Catholic press describing it as a ‘‘parable of charity, love, grace, and salvation.’’ There were, however, dissenting votes. The Italian leftists STRANGERS ON A TRAIN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1154 felt Fellini had betrayed neorealism, and some government factions protested the film’s exportation to other countries, claiming it pre- sented a sordid and immoral view of ordinary Italians. The film is the first of what is often described as Fellini’s trilogy of solitude—Il bidone and The Nights of Cabiria completing the trilogy. La strada won over 50 international awards, including the Grand Prize at the Venice Festival, The New York Film Critics Award, and the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. —Ronald Bowers STRANGERS ON A TRAIN USA, 1951 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 101 minutes. Released June 1951. Filmed fall 1950 in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Darien, Connecticut, and at an amusement park constructed on Rowland V. Lee’s ranch in Los Angeles. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay: Raymond Chandler and Czendi Ormonde, adapted by Whitfield Cook from the novel by Patricia Highsmith; photography: Robert Burks; editor: W. H. Ziegler; sound: Dolph Thomas; production designers: Ted Haworth and George James-Hopkins; music: Dimitri Tiomkin; special ef- fects: H. F. Koenekamp; costume designer: Leah Rodes. Cast: Farley Granger (Guy Haines); Ruth Roman (Ann Morton); Robert Walker (Bruno Anthony); Leo G. Carroll (Senator Mor- ton); Patricia Hitchcock (Barbara Morton); Laura Elliot (Miriam Haines); Marion Lorne (Mrs. Anthony); Jonathan Hale (Mr. Anthony); Howard St. John (Capt. Turley); John Brown (Professor Collins); Norma Varden (Mrs. Cunningham); Robert Gist (Hennessey); John Doucette (Hammond); Charles Meredith (Judge Dolan); Murray Alper (Boatman). Publications Script: Chandler, Raymond, and Czendi Ormonde, L’Inconnu du nord- express (Strangers on a Train), in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 December 1982. Books: Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Amengual, Barthélemy, Hitchcock, Paris, 1960. Bogdanovitch, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965; revised edition, as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, New York, 1989. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Le Cinema selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Simsolo, No?l, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1969. LaValley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Spoto, Donald, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1976. Taylor, John Russell, Hitch, London, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1982; London, 1983. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, editors, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcock, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Finler, Joel W., Hitchcock in Hollywood, New York, 1992. Sterritt, David, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1993. Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Auiler, Dan, Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1999. Freedman, Jonathan, and Richard Millington, editors, Hitchcock’s America, New York, 1999. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, 1999. Articles: Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1951. Winnington, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), August-Septem- ber 1951. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1953. Feuga, Pierre, in Arts (Paris), May 1954. Truffaut, Fran?ois, and Claude Chabrol, ‘‘Rencotre avec Hitchcock,’’ in Arts (Paris), February 1955. Seguin, Louis, in Positif (Paris), November 1955. Chabrol, Claude, in Arts (Paris), 28 December 1955. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Septem- ber 1956. STRANGERS ON A TRAINFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1155 Strangers on a Train Higham, Charles, ‘‘Hitchcock’s World,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Winter 1962–63. Sonbert, Warren, in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1966. Zucker, Phyllis, ‘‘Robert Walker,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1970. Humbert, M., and D. Delosne, in Image et Son (Paris), no. 286, 1974. Laemmle, Ann, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 14 Sep- tember 1978. Marty, A., ‘‘L’Inconnu du nord-express et le Maccarthisme,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), July-August 1980. Douglas, J.Y., ‘‘American Friends and Strangers on Trains,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 16, no. 3, 1988. Sered, J., ‘‘The Dark Side,’’ in Armchair Detective, no. 22, no. 2, 1989. Corber, R. J., ‘‘Reconstructing Homosexuality: Hitchcock and the Homoerotics of Spectatorial Pleasure,’’ in Discourse (Blooming- ton, Indiana), Spring-Summer 1991. Matthews, J.J., in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 6, Spring 1992. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 8, 1992. Desowitz, B., ‘‘Strangers on Which Train?’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 28, no. 3, May-June 1992. Chin, Paula, ‘‘Through a Mind, Darkly: Writing of Murder and Madness, Patricia Highsmith Heeds a Strange Muse,’’ in People Weekly, vol. 39, no. 1, 11 January 1993. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 179, July-August 1995. Lilley, Jessie, ‘‘Granger on a Train,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 21, Winter 1996. Valley, Richard, ‘‘The Trouble with Hitchcock: Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train Investigated!’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 21, Winter 1996. *** Alfred Hitchcock based Strangers on a Train (1951), one of his most suspenseful thrillers, on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. It begins with a railway journey, in the course of which Bruno Antony, a wealthy homosexual (Robert Walker, in an immaculate perform- ance), ingratiates himself with Guy Haines, a handsome tennis champion (Farley Granger). The slightly effeminate Bruno has all the earmarks of a textbook case in abnormal psychology, since he combines a deep-seated, implacable hatred of his domineering father with a curious attachment to his eccentric mother. As the two lunch A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1156 together on the train, it is evident that Guy, who is unhappily married to a conniving, promiscuous spouse, is fascinated by this fey, coyly ingratiating creature—so much so that from the start there is an unacknowledged homosexual undertone to their relationship. Farley Granger is cited in Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1987) as saying that ‘‘it was Robert Walker’s idea to play Bruno Antony as a homosexual.’’ On the contrary, it should be obvious from the foregoing remarks about Bruno’s background and behaviour that his approach to Guy as a rather blatant homosexual courting a latent one is embedded in the subtle screenplay, and not something Walker, as brilliant as he is in the part, superimposed on the characterization. Before they part company at journey’s end, Bruno tries to manipu- late Guy into agreeing to kill Bruno’s father, in exchange for Bruno murdering Guy’s wife, Miriam. Since neither of them has an ostensi- ble motive for committing the other’s crime, they would both, according to Bruno’s logic, successfully elude detection. This pro- posal appeals to Guy more than he is prepared to admit, since he would like to be rid of his hateful wife. Consequently, he does not reject Bruno’s plan immediately. Taking Guy’s indecision for tacit approval, the deranged Bruno kills Miriam and demands that Guy keep his part of the bargain, which Guy, in a moment of panic, agrees to do, just to get rid of Bruno. For novelist Patricia Highsmith, the way in which Bruno plays on the baser instincts of the fundamentally good-natured Guy signifies the duality that lies at the heart of human nature. Gordon Gow quotes her in Hollywood: 1920–70 as saying, ‘‘I’m very much concerned’’ with the way that good and evil exist in everyone ‘‘to a greater or lesser degree.’’ Raymond Chandler, the eminent crime novelist (The Big Sleep) and screenwriter, was very much preoccupied, as was Hitchcock, with bringing to light the dark corners of the human psyche; he accepted Hitchcock’s offer to draft the screenplay for Strangers. One of the most tense scenes in the picture is that in which Bruno strangles Guy’s estranged wife in a secluded corner of the amusement park. Ironically, the murder is accompanied by the distant music of the merry-go-round’s calliope, as it grinds out its cheery rendition of ‘‘The Band Played On.’’ Horrified, we watch the murder as it is reflected in Miriam’s glasses, which have fallen onto the grass during her struggle with Bruno. Photographed in this grotesquely distorted fashion, the strangling looks as if it were being viewed in a fun-house mirror, another reminder of the grimly incongruous carnival setting of the crime. Given the fact that Guy subconsciously wanted Miriam dead, he has, in effect, accomplished her death through the mediation of Bruno as his proxy. Guy has become, however unwittingly, allied with the perverse force of evil that Bruno represents; this is confirmed in the scene in which the two men stand on opposite sides of an iron fence, as Bruno informs Guy that he has taken Miriam’s life. When a police squad car appears across the street, instinctively Guy joins Bruno on the same side of the barrier, and thus acknowledges implicitly his share of the guilt in Miriam’s demise. Moreover, the image of Guy’s troubled face barred by the sinister shadows of the gate grill signals his imprisonment by Bruno in an unholy alliance from which he finds himself, for the time being, powerless to escape. Guy is suspected of killing his wife; but he is given the chance to redeem himself by pursuing Bruno back to the scene of Miriam’s murder and forcing him to confess the truth about her death. As they wrestle with each other aboard the carousel, the mechanism suddenly goes berserk, changing from a harmless source of innocent fun into a whirling instrument of terror. Thus the carousel is a reflection of Hitchcock’s dark vision of our chaotic, topsy-turvy planet. As the runaway merry-go-round continues to spin at top speed, its rendition of ‘‘The Band Played On’’ is also accelerated to a dizzying tempo and mingles with macabre persistence with the screams of the hysterical riders trapped on board. A mechanic at last manages to bring the carousel to a halt, but it stops so suddenly that the riders go sailing off in all directions, as the machinery collapses into a heap of smoldering wreckage. As the movie draws to a close, Bruno dies in the debris, unrepentant to the last. —Gene D. Phillips STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE See FRESA Y CHOCOLATE STREET OF SHAME See AKASEN CHITAI A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE USA, 1951 Director: Elia Kazan Production: Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 125 minutes. Released 1951. Producer: Charles K. Feldman; screenplay: Tennessee Williams, from Oscar Saul’s adaptation of the play by Williams; photography: Harry Stradling; editor: David Weisbart; art director: Richard Day; music: Alex North. Cast: Vivien Leigh (Blanche DuBois); Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski); Kim Hunter (Stella Kowalski); Karl Malden (Mitch). Awards: Oscars for Best Actress (Leigh), Best Supporting Actor (Malden), Best Supporting Actress (Hunter), and Art Direction/Set Direction—Black and White, 1951; Venice Film Festival, Best Actress (Leigh) and Special Jury Prize, 1951; New York Film Critics Awards for Best Motion Picture, Best Actress (Leigh), and Best Direc- tion, 1951. Publications Script: Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire, in Film Scripts One, edited by George P. Garrett and others, New York, 1971. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIREFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1157 A Streetcar Named Desire Books: Lawson, John Howard, Film in the Battle of Ideas, New York, 1953. Robyns, Gwen, Light of a Star: The Career of Vivien Leigh, New York, 1970. Basinger, Jeanine, editor, Working with Kazan, Middletown, Con- necticut, 1973. Kazan, Elia, Elia Kazan on What Makes a Director, New York, 1973. Thomas, Tony, The Films of Marlon Brando, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1973. Ciment, Michel, Kazan on Kazan, New York, 1974. Shipman, David, Brando, London, 1974. Edwards, Anne, Vivien Leigh: A Biography, New York, 1977. Yacowar, Maurice, Tennessee Williams and Film, New York, 1977. Manvell, Roger, Theatre and Film: A Comparative Study of the Two Forms of Dramatic Art, and of the Problems of Adaptation of Stage Plays into Films, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1979. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Pauly, Thomas H., An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture, Philadelphia, 1983. Downing, David, Marlon Brando, London, 1984. Carey, Gary, Marlon Brando: The Only Contender, London, 1985. Michaels, Lloyd, Elia Kazan: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1985. Higham, Charles, Brando: The Unauthorized Biography, New York, 1987. Kazan, Elia, A Life, New York, 1988. Niemeier, Susanne, Ein Fall im Medienvergleich: Film- und Fernsehversion von A Streetcar Named Desire, Frankfurt, 1990. Grobel, Lawrence, Conversations with Brando, Lanham, 1993, 1999. Brando, Marlon, Songs My Mother Taught Me, with Robert Lindsey, New York, 1994. Malden, Karl, and Carla Malden, When Do I Start?: A Memoir, New York, 1997. Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra and Kazan, New York, 1998. Lobrutto, Elia Kazan, Old Tappan, 1999. Young, Jeff, editor, Kazan—The Master Director Discusses His Films: Interviews with Elia Kazan, New York, 1999. Baer, William, editor, Elia Kazan: Interviews, Jackson, 2000. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1158 Articles: Lightman, Herb A., ‘‘Uninhibited Camera,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), October 1951. Isaacs, Hermine, Eleanor Nash, and Francis Patterson, in Films in Review (New York), December 1951. Reisz, Karel, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1952. Brinson, Peter, ‘‘The Brooder,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1954. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Elia Kazan—The Genesis of a Style,’’ in Film Culture (New York), vol. 2, no. 2, 1956. Bowers, Ronald, ‘‘Vivien Leigh,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1956. ‘‘A Quiz for Kazan,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), November 1956. Delahaye, Michel, ‘‘A Natural Phenomenon: Interview with Elia Kazan,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), March 1967. Corliss, Richard, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1968. ‘‘Kazan Issue’’ of Movie (London), Winter 1971–72. Kitses, Jim, ‘‘Elia Kazan: A Structuralist Analysis,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Winter 1972–73. Burles, Kenneth T., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Dowling, E., ‘‘The Derailment of A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 9, no. 4, 1981. Black, David Alan, ‘‘Sexual Misdemeanor/Psychoanalytic Felony,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Winter 1987. Weinraub, B., ‘‘For a Less Restrained Era, a Restored Streetcar,’’ in New York Times, vol. 142, C12, 16 September 1993. Schickel, R., ‘‘A ‘50s Masterpiece for the ‘90s,’’ in Time, vol. 142, 1 November 1993. Kauffmann, S., ‘‘Back to Brando,’’ in New Republic, vol. 209, 29 November 1993. Cahir, Linda Costanzo, ‘‘The Artful Rerouting of A Streetcar Named Desire,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 22, no. 2, April 1994. Manso, P., ‘‘Brando’s Way,’’ in Vanity Fair (New York), vol. 57, September 1994. Manso, P., ‘‘Bringing Up Baby,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 8, October 1994. Care, Ross, ‘‘Record Track,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 19, Summer 1995. Benedetto, Robert, ‘‘A Streetcar Named Desire: Adapting the Play to Film,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1997. *** Partisans of America’s Broadway stage, the ‘‘fabulous invalid’’ of 1920s, when pessimists feared that talking pictures would lure new generations away from live theatre, were greatly heartened when after the early successes of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1945), and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), the promising newcomers followed up their success with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). World War II over, a glorious new theatrical era appeared to be underway. However, the two dazzling Expressionist tragedies proved the climax of the period of psychodrama between the wars rather than the prologue to another era of greater accomplishment. Both plays were directed in New York by the same socially conscious Greek immigrant, Elia Kazan, who had gained extensive experience, both acting and directing during the 1930s, and who, just as he turned 40, had begun moving between the stage and screen. After scoring impressive successes in the late 1940s with controver- sial films about social problems (Pinky, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Panic in the Streets), he was engaged to direct the film version of Streetcar, but Death of a Salesman was assigned to Hollywood newcomer Laslo Benedek. Although the latter made headlines by being picketed by the American Legion, it proved unmemorable, but A Streetcar Named Desire was a smashing success, despite the problems of transferring the play to the screen. The principal problem was censorship. Williams’ play depicts the pathetic degeneration of Blanche DuBois, daughter of a once wealthy family of Mississippi planters, whose socially proper young husband killed himself after being discovered in bed with another man. Blanche watches her family squander its fortune on ‘‘epic debaucher- ies’’ until they lose their beautiful dream mansion, Belle Rêve. She is obliged to take a poorly paid job as a school-teacher and move into a squalid hotel, from which she is finally evicted because of her ‘‘intimacies’’ with travelling salesmen and high school boys. She is forced to take refuge in New Orleans with her unenthusiastic sister Stella, who has sought to escape the past by marrying a vulgar but virile Polish immigrant. Hostilities immediately flare up between pretentious Blanche and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, who suspects that the sister is trying to cheat his wife out of an inheritance. He investigates her past and breaks up a budding romance with one of his poker-playing buddies and finally completes her degradation by raping her while Stella is in the hospital bearing their first child. Blanche’s shift into probably congenital madness is completed by this traumatic violence, and she is institutionalized as Stella returns to Stanley. Kazan wanted the film to be as true as possible to the play. Tennessee Williams refused to write the script, but insisted on approving any changes. When Kazan took Oscar Saul’s script to Joseph Breen’s office, which administered the Production Code, Thomas Pauly reports that he learned that to get the seal of approval that most exhibitors required, 68 changes, including major omissions of any references to homosexuality, nymphomania, or the rape—the principal causes of Blanche’s downfall, would have to be made. The first two big no-nos were handled by awkwardly glossing over them with euphemistic references to ‘‘nervous tendencies’’ that many viewers already understood from widespread discussion of the play. Kazan insisted, however, that the rape was essential. Breen acqui- esced, so long as there was no evidence of evil intention on Stanley’s part, as leeringly suggested by the line in the play, ‘‘We’ve had this date with each other for a long time,’’ and by merely suggesting what will transpire as Stanley advances on the terrified Blanche, brandish- ing a beer bottle which he smashes into a mirror. Since the Code also demanded that crimes could not be exonerated, Breen insisted that Stella must make it clear that she will not return to Stanley, even though many viewers would realize that in the still patriarchal South a woman with a baby might have no alternative. Other problems arose. Kazan had at first wanted to open up the film with scenes from Blanche’s life in Mississippi; but he finally realized, as Pauly points out, that Williams’ intentions could only be realized by confining the principal action to the Kowalski’s claustro- phobic apartment. Only the opening scene of Blanche’s arrival STROMBOLIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1159 walking down a street that is certainly not—as identified in the movie—the wide, tree-lined Elysian Fields, was shot on location. As production began, the conflict in the storyline between the decadent tradition of a self-destructive, snobbish society, and the macho violence of a vigorous outsider seeking to take over its social position provided the opportunity of a subtext, probably unintended by the playwright or director, about another conflict between tradition and innovation. Kazan had brought most of his Broadway cast with him; but Vivien Leigh, playing Blanche, had developed her interpre- tation of the role in the London production under the direction of her husband, Laurence Olivier. Although Williams and Kazan agreed that the emphasis in the film, as in the play, must be on Blanche, Kazan and Leigh clashed over her demeanour in the early scenes, as she argued that Blanche should be played sympathetically throughout. One senses beyond the surface class and gender conflict about which Tennessee Williams had ambiguous feelings an even tougher though understated conflict between two acting traditions—the exacting standards of classically trained performers for an established society and the controversial new method acting of the New York Actors Studio, with which Kazan was associated, which emphasized improvization and reflected in its work the alienation of a rebellious generation at a time when social and artistic traditions were un- der attack. The result, abetted by the Breen office’s inflexibility, was an immediate victory for tradition. Vivien Leigh gives an almost incom- parable performance, transcending medium limitations and, by in- voking the ‘‘suspension of disbelief’’ that sublime art requires, getting in touch with the audience as Blanche DuBois, a woman they may suffer with or scorn, but cannot ignore. Leigh triumphs by reversing the memorable image of her related role as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind or indomitable will, to become a symbol of the ever-suffering victims of maligned self-glorifiers with whom the world had become so familiar prior to and during World War II. She justly won her second Academy Award for best actress in a trouble- some year when the bitter contest for best picture honours between Streetcar and A Place in the Sun (George Stevens’ version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy), was settled by default with the award going to Vincente Minnelli’s lightweight but uplifting An American in Paris. (Hollywood veteran Stevens was consoled with the Best Director’s award, while Humphrey Bogart as Best Actor in The African Queen beat relative newcomer Brando.) In the long run, however, while the sometimes fatal struggle continues between unreconciled extremist groups in the United States, Williams’ vision of his ending for the tragedy seems prophetic as the ‘‘natural’’ behaviour of those struggling for survival and advancement grows, a stronger force than that defending artificiali- ties of traditional culture—an American tendency that is increasingly exported abroad. Inevitably a flawed film because of the conditions imposed upon its creation, A Streetcar Named Desire remains an indispensable period piece that vividly projects an image of more aspects of its period than its creators may have realized. —Warren French STRIKE See STACHKA STROMBOLI Italy, 1950 Director: Roberto Rossellini Production: Berit Films, for RKO; black and white; running time: 81 minutes, originally 107 minutes; length: 7,300 feet. Released 1950. Producer: Roberto Rossellini; assistant director: Marcello Caracciolo; screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Art Cohn, Sergio Amidei, Gianpaolo Callegari, from a story by Rossellini, religious theme inspired by Father Felix Morlion; photography: Ottello Martelli; editor: Roland Gross; sound: Terry Kellum, E. Giordani; music: Renzo Rossellini. Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Karin); Mario Vitale (Antonio); Renzo Cesana (Priest); Mario Sponza (Lighthouse-keeper); the people of Stromboli. Publications Books: Hovald, Patrice, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1958. Steele, Joseph Henry, Ingrid Bergman, London, 1960. Mida, Massimo, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1961. Verdone, Mario, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1963. Sarris, Andrew, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1967. Guarner, Jose Luis, Roberto Rossellini, New York, 1970. Ivaldi, Nedo, La Resitenza nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra, Rome, 1970. Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1970. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Wlaschin, Ken, Italian Cinema Since the War, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1971. Baldelli, Pierre, Roberto Rossellini, Rome, 1972. Brown, Curtis F., Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1973. Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus, New York, 1973. Rondolini, Gianni, Roberto Rossellini, Florence, 1974. Bergman, Ingrid, with Alan Burgess, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, New York, 1980. Ranvaud, Don, Roberto Rossellini, London, 1981. Taylor, John Russell, Ingrid Bergman, London, 1983. Rossellini, Roberto, Le Cinéma révélé, edited by Alain Bergala, Paris, 1984. Hillier, Jim, editor, Cahiers du Cinéma 1: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London, 1985. Leamer, Laurence, As Time Goes By: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1986. Serceau, Michel, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, 1986. Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini, Oxford, 1987; reprinted, Berke- ley, 1996. STROMBOLI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1160 Stromboli Gansera, Rainer, and others, Roberto Rossellini, Munich, 1987. Rossellini, Roberto, Il mio metodo: Scritti e intervisti, edited by Adriano Apra, Venice, 1987. Rossi, P., Roberto Rossellini: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Bondanella, Peter, Films of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1993. Rossellini, Roberto, My Method: Writings and Interviews, New York, 1995. Gallagher, Tag, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Cambridge, 1998. Articles: Motion Picture Herald (New York), 18 February 1950. Harcourt-Smith, Simon, ‘‘The Stature of Rossellini,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), April 1950. Houston, Penelope, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1950. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1951. Schèrer, Maurice, and Fran?ois Truffaut, ‘‘Entretien avec Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July 1954. Truffaut, Fran?ois, ‘‘Rossellini,’’ in Arts (Paris), January 1955. Tynan, Kenneth, ‘‘The Abundant Miss Bergman,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1958. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Rossellini Rediscovered,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 32, 1964. Casty, Alan, ‘‘The Achievement of Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1964. Apra, Adriano, and Maurizio Ponzi, ‘‘Intervista con Roberto Rossellini,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), April-May 1965. Wood, Robin, in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1974. Damico, J., ‘‘Ingrid from Lorraine to Stromboli: Analyzing the Public’s Perception of a Film Star,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 1, 1975. Beylie, Claude, and C. Clouzot, interview with Rossellini, in Ecran (Paris), July 1977. Lawton, H., ‘‘Rossellini’s Didactic Cinema,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. ‘‘Rossellini’s Stromboli and Ingrid Bergman’s Face,’’ in Movietone News (Seattle), December 1979. Adair, Gilbert, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1980. Ranvaud, Don, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February and March 1981. STROMBOLIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1161 Tesson, C., ‘‘La Méprise, le mépris,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1981. Cinématographe (Paris), November 1981. Serceau, M., ‘‘Rossellini—le prisme des idéologies,’’ Image et Son (Paris), April 1982. Amiel, M., ‘‘Ingrid Bergman: Force, dignité, courage,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), October 1982. ‘‘Ingrid Bergman Section’’ of Casablanca (Madrid), October 1982. ‘‘Rossellini Issue’’ of Casablanca (Madrid), March 1985. Nieuwenweg, L., ‘‘De liefdes van Roberto Rossellini: ‘Ik haat actrices, het zijn ijdele wezens,’’’ in Skoop (Amsterdam), Septem- ber-October 1985. Zizek, S., ‘‘Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man,’’ in October (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Fall 1990. Duran?on, Jean, ‘‘Stromboli, ou le réalisme n’existe pas,’’ in CinémAction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), no. 70, January 1994. Philippon, A., ‘‘Stromboli, c’est pas fini,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 481, June 1994. Télérama (Paris), no. 2384, 23 September 1995. McLean, A.L., ‘‘The Cinderella Princess and the Instrument of Evil: Surveying the Limits of Female Transgression in Two Postwar Hollywood Scandals,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 34, no. 3, 1995. Jacobwitz, F., ‘‘Rewriting Realism: Bergman and Rossellini in Europe 1949–1955,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 41, 1996. Magny, J., ‘‘Eric Rohmer: cineaste chretien?’’ in Cinemaction (Conde- sur-Noireau), vol. 80, no. 3, 1996. Azua, F. de, ‘‘Mas que mala,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), vol. 23, January 1997. *** Stromboli was the first of five features which Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, the others being Europa ‘51, Viaggio in Italia, Giovanna d’Arco al rogo and La paura. He also directed her in an episode of the portmanteau film Siamo donne. The making of Stromboli was fraught with problems and difficulties. For one thing, the film coincided with the start of the much publicised and, in the United States at least, much frowned-upon affair between Bergman and Rossellini. After the failure of Joan of Arc and Arch of Triumph, Bergman, who was becoming increasingly unhappy in Hollywood and in her marriage, was looking for a way out of both. However, she was highly bankable, and both Samuel Goldwyn and RKO’s Howard Hughes showed interest in her idea of doing a picture with Rossellini. In the event Goldwyn backed out after seeing Germany, Year Zero and it was RKO which financed Stromboli. In spite of her feelings for Rossellini, Bergman found the director’s improvisatory methods somewhat alien (although she coped far better than George Sanders in Viaggio), conditions on the island itself were primitive and arduous (indeed, during the final eruption sequence one of Rossellini’s crew succumbed to the sulphurous fumes and died of a heart attack), the shoot was dogged by inquisitive paparazzi, and the picture went over schedule and over budget. It had always been agreed to release an Italian and an English language version of the film, both of which were to be edited by Rossellini. However, as a result of rows about the budget RKO edited the English version itself, which differs consider- ably from the Italian one (which Rossellini himself edited) and was disowned by the director. The existence of two different versions makes it even more difficult to judge this particularly controversial film. With few exceptions (notably Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, and Peter Bru- nette), the film has found no friends among Anglo-Saxon critics and, given the treatment meted out by them to Viaggio, it is doubtful that things would have been any different had they seen Rossellini’s own version. In France, Stromboli, like the other Rossellini-Bergman collaborations, was championed by Cahiers, and especially by André Bazin, Jacques Rivette, and Maurice Schèrer (Eric Rohmer). Mean- while, in Italy the situation was rather more complicated; those who disliked the film tended to accuse Rossellini of ‘‘abandoning neorealism’’ (often with the implicit suggestion that this was due to his infatuation with Ingrid Bergman), thus pushing the film’s support- ers into defending it as a neo-realist text, which is perhaps not the most productive or helpful way to look at Stromboli. The film is set in a Europe still suffering from the after effects of World War II. In order to get out of an internment camp, Karin, a Lithuanian refugee, marries Antonio, a young fisherman from the volcanic island of Stromboli, and goes to live with him there. However, she cannot adapt to life there and decides to escape. Crossing the island she becomes caught up in a volcanic eruption, and the enormity of the event brings her to reconsider her position. The ‘‘story’’ is the same in both versions, but the emphases, and the whole manner of telling, are quite different. In particular the English version comes complete with a portentous commentary which frequently forces a specific reading on scenes which the director preferred to remain ‘‘open.’’ This is particularly damaging in the film’s climax, where the commentary insists that ‘‘out of her terror and her suffering Karin had found a great need for God. And she knew that only in her return to the village could she hope for peace.’’ In Rossellini’s version it is by no means clear that Karin has decided to return to the village, nor are her experiences presented in such overtly religious terms, although it is made quite clear that she has undergone a momentous inner experience. As Rossellini himself put it, ‘‘a woman has undergone the trials of war; she comes out of it bruised and hardened, no longer knowing what a human feeling is. The important thing was to find out if this woman could still cry, and the film stops there, when the first tears begin to flow.’’ Equally as damaging as the addition of the commentary in the English version is the excision of all sorts of scenes in which nothing ‘‘happens’’ in a story sense, but a great deal is communicated about Karin and about her ambivalent relationship with the island and her husband. On the other hand, it has to be said that even RKO couldn’t turn Stromboli into a conventional narrative film, and that enough of Rossellini’s original conception remains for it to have been generally dismissed as simply ‘‘badly made!’’ Such epithets are usually em- ployed à propos the film’s apparent casualness, even roughness, of style and construction, but far more to the point is Bazin’s remark that Stromboli and the other Bergman films ‘‘make one think of a sketch; the stroke indicates but does not paint. But should one take this sureness of stroke for poverty or laziness? One might as well reproach Matisse.’’ Unfortunately, however, while Rossellini’s approach may well alienate those looking for the ‘‘well-made film,’’ it does not offer the kind of pleasures usually sought by art house audiences. As Robin Wood has pointed out, Stromboli will disappoint cinephiles looking for ‘‘striking images, imaginative effects, a sense (whether justified or not) of intellectual profundity. Rossellini’s art rests on a paradox. As the true heir (as well as one of the founders) of neorealism, he is committed to showing only the surfaces of physical reality, without distortion or intervention in the form of special effects, surrealist images, dramatic compositions or symbolic lighting (though the last DER STUDENT VON PRAG FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1162 two are not unknown in his work); yet no director is more single- mindedly concerned with the invisible, the spiritual. More than with any other director the essential meaning has to be read behind and between the images, in the implications of the film’s movement which rise to the surface only in rare privileged moments whose significance is never overtly explained and which draw their intensity as much from the accumulation of context as from anything present in the image’’ (Film Comment, July-August 1974). Stromboli is very much ‘‘about’’ Karin and the development of her consciousness. (On another level it’s also ‘‘about’’ Bergman too.) However, what seems to have confused and alienated most commen- tators is Rossellini’s refusal to have anything to do with the conven- tional paraphernalia of ‘‘subjective’’ cinema. As in the films of Antonioni, only in a much more subtle, less self-conscious fashion, we come to understand the central character largely through the ways in which she is placed in and reacts to the landscape. However, the spectator looks at Karin rather than with her, and we come to understand rather than empathise with her. Such an approach to his central character is absolutely consistent with Rossellini’s approach to his subject matter as a whole in the film, which, as befitting his neo- realist heritage, remains resolutely objective, and even distanced. As Peter Brunette has noted, one is frequently tempted in Stromboli to ask ‘‘where is Rossellini in all of this?’’ Equally, one wonders whether a good deal of the critical hostility towards this film stems from its refusal to yield any easy answers on this point. The truth is that, just as Rossellini shows rather than explains, so he refuses to come down on the side either of Karin or Antonio/the island, thus leaving spectators the space largely to make up their own minds. The film may focus largely on Karin and her developing consciousness but, as Wood points out, ‘‘our sense of the alien-ness of the primitive community seen through Karin’s eyes is everywhere counterpointed by our sense of the integrity of Stromboli’s culture and its functional involvement with nature, against Karin’s sophisticated needs and moral confusion.’’ This, of course, is not the same thing as saying that the film takes Stromboli’s side against Karin’s (as some have indeed suggested that it does) but, rather, it is simply to be aware of the film’s rich ambivalence and the director’s openness towards both his mate- rial and the spectators of his film. How sad, then, that such admirable sentiments should have resulted in such ill-informed, shortsighted critical vilification. —Julian Petley DER STUDENT VON PRAG (The Student of Prague) Germany, 1913 Director: Stellan Rye Production: Deutsche Bioscop GmbH (Berlin); black and white, 35mm, silent; length: 5 to 6 reels, 5,046 feet, later cut to 4,817 feet. Released 1913. Filmed at Belvedere Castle and on Alchemist Street in Prague and at Fürstenburg and Lobkowitz Palaces. Cost: 30,000 marks. Screenplay: Hanns Heinz Ewers with Paul Wegener, epigraphs from Alfred de Musset’s poem ‘‘The December Night’’; photography: Guido Seeber; art director: Klaus Richter and Robert A. Dietrich. Cast: Paul Wegener (Balduin); Fritz Weidemann (Baron Schwarzenberg); John Gottowt (Scapinelli); Lida Salmonova (Lyduschka, country girl); Grete Berger (Margit, Countess Waldis- Schwarzenberg); Lothar K?rner (Count Waldis-Schwarzenberg). Publications Script: Ewers, Hanns Heinz, with Paul Wegener, Der Student von Prag: Einführung und Protokoll, edited by Helmut H. Diederichs, Stuttgart, 1985. Books: Ewers, Hanns Heinz, Langheinrich-Anthos, and Heinrich Noeren, Der Student von Prag: Eine Idee von Hanns Heinz Ewers, Berlin, 1930. Sadoul, Georges, Histoire générale du cinéma, Paris, 1946. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Bucher, Felix, Germany, London and New York, 1970. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1973. Garbicz, Adam, and Jacek Klinowski, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Articles: Magill’s Survey of Cinema: Silent Films, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982. Schlüpmann, Heide, ‘‘Zum Doppelg?ngermotiv in Der Student von Prag,” in Frauen und Film (Frankfurt), February 1984. Thüna, Ulrich, ‘‘Aus dem Reich der Toten,’’ in EPD Film (Frank- furt), vol. 5, no. 11, November 1988. Veress, J., ‘‘A pragai diak,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), no. 12, January 1993. Holl, S., and F. Kittler, ‘‘Kabbale et medias,’’ in Trafic (Paris), no. 22, Summer 1997. *** Stellan Rye’s version of The Student of Prague has been unjustly neglected in the 70 years since its production. Seen today, the film’s technical facility, though not innovative in illustrating the Doppelg?nger motif, is nevertheless particularly adroit, serving its subject with taste, restraint and subdued visual elegance. As a tale of the fantastic, the film looks both backward to similar thematic treatments in the Germanic legend of Faust and the tales of E. T. A. Hoffman (as well as Poe’s William Wilson and Wilde’s Dorian Gray) and forward to the overtly Expressionist treatment of alter egos in the great films of the 1920s (Caligari and his somnambulist-slave Cesare, Maria and her robot double in Metropolis.) Expressionism as an art form was flourishing by 1910, but it had not yet taken hold in film by 1913 DER STUDENT VON PRAGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1163 Der Student von Prag because the cinema was still held in contempt by most ‘‘serious’’ artists. The Student of Prague is a story of the fantastic told in a naturalistic manner, photographed against picturesque backdrops of the castles and streets of Prague’s old city. The director Stellan Rye was a Danish expatriate who had staged plays and scripted films in Copenhagen. Screenwriter Hanns Heinz Ewers was already celebrated for his supernatural tales tinged with elements of eroticism and sadism; today most critics view his work in light of his subsequent notoriety as official chronicler in prose and film of Nazi hero Horst Wessel. Paul Wegener, already one of the most famous actors of Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, had long been fascinated by the artistic potential of film, and he found the inspiration for his cinematic debut in a series of comic photographs of a man fencing and playing cards with himself. Together with Ewers, Wegener concocted the story of Balduin, a student who sells his mirror reflection to the gnomish eccentric Scapinelli in exchange for fortune and the woman of his dreams. The reflection begins to haunt Balduin, appearing with greater frequency until the desperate student shoots it, and in the process, kills himself. To effect the multiple exposure technique necessary to make Wegener’s dual roles convincing, Rye enlisted the talents of cinematographer Guido Seeber, who was already considered a mas- ter. From a photographic standpoint, Seeber’s work is an unusual mixture of the archaic and the innovative. Interiors are shot in a flat, uninteresting manner, but the exteriors feature exquisitely composed vistas of Prague’s castles and courtyards. The scenes in which Balduin flees from his double through the deserted streets of Prague only to encounter him at every juncture are worthy of the nightmare images of films to follow in the wake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Though no stylization is evident in the set design, Seeber’s lighting technique becomes quite striking—indeed almost expressionist—in the gambling scene. Perhaps inspired by Reinhardt’s productions, a simple overhead light illuminates Balduin’s gaming table as, one by one, his card-playing adversaries lose, disappearing into darkness. Balduin remains alone for a few seconds until he is joined by his double who asks ‘‘Dare you to play with me?’’ The Student of Prague was the most expensive film produced in Germany up to that time, and it was an enormous success both with the critics and audiences. Although Rye and Wegener were to work together on several more projects, the collaboration was cut short by Rye’s untimely death in a French war hospital in 1914. The two remakes of the film have their individual merits: Henrik Galeen’s SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1164 1926 version reteams Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss (Cesare and Caligari) and is extolled by Paul Rotha for its exceptional pictorial qualities; the 1936 Arthur Robison version with Anton Walbrook gives human motivation to the demonic pact by making Scapinelli (Theodor Loos) a jealous rival of Balduin’s. The original, however, remains most important to film history. The Student of Prague’s marriage of naturalism to the first glimmers of Expressionism in German film provides an eloquent signpost to the dark visions to come. —Lee Tsiantis SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS USA, 1941 Director: Preston Sturges Production: Paramount Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 90 minutes. Released 1941. Producer: Paul Jones; original story and screenplay: Preston Sturges; photography: John Seitz; editor: Stuart Gilmore; art directors: Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick; music: Leo Shuken and Charles Bradshaw; special effects: Farciot Edouart. Cast: Joel McCrea (John L. Sullivan); Veronica Lake (The Girl); Robert Warwick (Mr. Le Brand); William Demarest (Mr. Jones); Franklin Pangborn (Mr. Casalsis); Porter Hall (Mr. Hadrian); Byron Foulger (Mr. Vadelle); Margaret Hayes (Secretary); Torben Meyer (Doctor); Robert Greig (Sullivan’s butler); Eric Blore (Sullivan’s valet); Al Bridge (Sheriff); Esther Howard (Miz Zeffie); Almira Sessions (Ursula); Frank Moran (Chauffeur); George Renavent (Old tramp); Victor Potel (Cameraman); Richard Webb (Radio man); Harry Rosenthal (The trombenick); Jimmy Conlin (The trusty); Jan Buckingham (Mrs. Sullivan); Robert Winkler (Bud); Chick Collins (Capital); Jimmie Dundee (Labor); Charles Moore (Black chef); Al Bridge (The mister); Harry Hayden (Mr. Carson); Willard Robertson (Judge); Pat West (Counterman—roadside lunch wagon); J. Farrell MacDonald (Desk sergeant); Edward Hearn (Cop—Beverly Hills station); Roscoe Ates (Counterman—Owl Wagon); Paul Newlan (Truck driver); Arthur Hoyt (Preacher); Gus Reed (Mission cook); Robert Dudley (One-legged man); George Anderson (Sullivan’s ex- manager); Monte Blue (Cop in slums); Harry Tyler (R.R. information clerk); Dewey Robinson (Sheriff); Madame Sul-te-wan (Harmonium player); Jess Lee Brooks (Black preacher); Perc Launders (Yard Man); Emory Parnell (Man at R.R. shack); Julius Tannen (Public defender); Edgar Dearing (Cop—Mud Gag); Howard Mitchell (Rail- road clerk); Harry Seymour (Entertainer in air-raid shelter); Bill Bletcher (Entertainer in hospital); Chester Conklin (Old man); Frank Mills (Drunk in theater). Publications Script: Sturges, Preston, Sullivan’s Travels, in Five Screenplays, edited by Brian Henderson, Berkeley, 1985. Books: Sarris, Andrew, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1967. Lake, Veronica, with Donald Bain, Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake, London, 1969. Mast, Gerald, The Comic Mind, New York, 1973; revised edition, Chicago, 1979. Ursini, James, The Fabulous Life and Times of Preston Sturges, An American Dreamer, New York, 1973. Byron, Stuart, editor, Movie Comedy, New York, 1977. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, Hollywood on Hollywood, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Cywinski, Ray, Satires and Sideshows: The Films and Career of Preston Sturges, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Gordon, James R., Comic Structures in the Films of Preston Sturges, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Curtis, James, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges, New York, 1982. Cywinski, Ray, Preston Sturges: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Dickos, Andrew, Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1985. Spoto, Donald, Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges, Boston, 1990. Sturges, Preston, Preston Sturges, adapted and edited by Sandy Sturges, New York, 1990. Jacobs, Diane, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges, Berkeley, 1992. Rozgonyi, Jay, Preston Sturges’s Vision of America: Critical Analyses of Fourteen Films, Jefferson, 1995. Harvey, James, Romantic Comedy: In Hollywood, From Lubitsch to Sturges, Cambridge, 1998. Articles: ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Current Biography Yearbook, New York, 1941. Variety (New York), 10 December 1941. Times (London), 1 January 1942. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 26 January 1942. New York Times, 29 January 1942. Crowther, Bosley, ‘‘Where Satire and Slapstick Meet,’’ in New York Times Magazine, 27 August 1944. Ericsson, Peter, ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Sequence (London), Sum- mer 1948. Kracauer, Siegfried, ‘‘Preston Sturges; or, Laughter Betrayed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1950. King, Nel, and G. W. Stonier, ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer-Autumn 1959. Farber, Manny, and W. S. Poster, ‘‘Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 26, 1962. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1965. Budd, Michael, ‘‘Notes on Preston Sturges and America,’’ in Film Society Review (New York), January 1968. Bowser, Eileen, in Film Notes, New York, 1969. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Spring 1972. Cluny, C. M., in Cinéma (Paris), February 1973. Dupuich, J. J., in Image et Son (Paris), March 1973. SULLIVAN’S TRAVELSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1165 Sullivan’s Travels Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), April 1973. Chacona, Hollis, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), Fall 1976. Rubinstein, R., ‘‘Hollywood Travels: Sturges and Sullivan,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1977–78. Bodeen, DeWitt, ‘‘Joel McCrea and Francis Dee,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1978. Ursini, James, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Wineapple, B., ‘‘Finding an Audience: Sullivan’s Travels,” in Jour- nal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Win- ter 1984. Shokoff, J., ‘‘A Kockenlocker by Any Other Word: The Democratic Comedy of Preston Sturges,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 8, no. 1, 1988. Magny, Jo?l, and others, ‘‘Preston ‘Dynamite’ Sturges,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 426, December 1989. Kieffer, Anne, and Andrée Tournés, ‘‘Locarno: Preston Sturges redécouvert,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), no. 199, February- March 1990. Amiel, Vincent, and others, ‘‘Preston Sturges: Hollywood et Lilliput,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 349, March 1990. Levine, L.W., ‘‘The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and its Audience,’’ in American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 5, 1992. Morris, R., ‘‘Role Models,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 4, Octo- ber 1992. *** Sullivan’s Travels is writer-director Preston Sturges’s version of ‘‘the clown who wants to pay Hamlet’’ in which he proves that the world needs a clown more than it needs a Hamlet. Sturges was a director of such skill and cunning that he could both destroy and elevate an institution simultaneously. Sullivan’s Travels, one of his best films and certainly one of his most personal (as it is about a Hollywood director), both attacks and celebrates Hollywood with such balance and panache that fans and detractors are equally satisfied with the results. This ambivalence characterizes the work of Sturges, whose career has undergone a recent critical re-evaluation. One of the most successful and respected writer-directors of the 1940s, his career fell apart after a decade of critical and commercial success. He died an out-of-fashion, nearly forgotten man in 1959. Throughout the 1960s SULT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1166 and into the 1970s, his work was largely unknown. Now that his career is being favourably re-assessed, his comedies of American life, manners and mores are being restored to their rightful position as first-rate examples of Hollywood filmmaking and humor. Sullivan’s Travels undertakes a bold assignment. Its narrative shifts from comedy to tragedy and back to comedy, something seldom successfully accomplished in film. Those who criticize the film do so on the basis of its serious scenes when the hero, Joel McCrea, is arrested and sent to a prison chain gang, where the only thing the convicts have to look forward to is the cartoon they share with a black church group on special occasions. The film’s structure, however, is skillfully executed, and the hero’s descent into a social hell uncushioned by money and power is presented largely through an effective montage, followed by the prison sequence. The ultimate return to comedy is indeed abrupt, but it demonstrates the theme of the film. The structure is attuned to the basic universe of the Sturges world, which is a schizophrenic one, part sophistication and part slapstick, a world of contradiction and conflict. Sturges’s technical presentation carries out this confusion and chaos, by frequently disintegrating into rapid montage. Although he was a master of writing witty repartee, Sturges also loved visual gags and the sort of pratfalls associated with silent film comedy. He wove these two seemingly contradictory traditions—dialogue comedy and physical comedy—together into films like Sullivan’s Travels which fans call ‘‘free-wheeling’’ and critics call ‘‘frenzied.’’ The slambang quality of the Sturges films, coupled with the basic violence of his comedy, contributed to the eventual disfavor of his work. Today Sturges may be seen as a great American satirist, and Sullivan’s Travels is often called ‘‘Swiftian.’’ It ably demonstrates the Sturges brand of comedy. The script is dense with hilarious dialogue, and the characterizations demonstrate his incredible atten- tion to detail that makes a real human being out of the smallest, most outrageous part. The most successful portions of the film are those in which he satirizes Hollywood with an insider’s advantage. As always, Sturges was adept at pointing out the absurdity and essential phonies of a world which, rotten to the core and corrupted by the desires for money and success, maintains an outward sheen of respectability and good manners. —Jeanine Basinger SULT (Hunger) Denmark-Norway-Sweden, 1966 Director: Henning Carlsen Production: Henning Carlsen (Denmark), ABC Film, Sandrews (Norway), and Svensk Filmindustri (Sweden); black and white, 35mm, widescreen; running time: 111 minutes; length: 3,055 meters. Released 19 August 1966, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Producer: Bertil Ohlsson; screenplay: Henning Carlsen and Peter Seeberg, from the book by Knut Hamsun; photography: Henning Kristiansen; editor: Henning Carlsen; sound: Erik Jensen; art direc- tors: Erik Aaes and Walther Dannerford; music: Krzysztof Komeda; costume designer: Ada Skolmen. Cast: Per Oscarsson (The Writer); Gunnel Lindblom (Ylajali); Sigrid Horne-Rasmussen (Landlady); Osvald Helmuth (Pawnbroker); Birgitte Federspiel (Ylajali’s sister); Henki Kolstad (Editor); Sverre Hansen (Beggar); Egil Hjort Jensen (Man in the park); Per Theodor Haugen (Shop assistant); Lars Nordrum (The Count); Roy Bj?rnstad (Painter). Publications Books: Kauffmann, Stanley, Figures of Light, New York, 1971. Wagner, Geoffrey, The Novel and the Cinema, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1975. Articles: Sussex, Elizabeth, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1967–68. ‘‘Biographical Note on Henning Carlsen,’’ in International Film Guide, London, 1968. Duperley, Denis, in Films and Filming (London), May 1968. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), October 1968. Canham, Kingsley, in Films and Filming (London), February 1969. Decaux, E., ‘‘Entretien avec Henning Carlsen,’’ and ‘‘Le Cinéma danois,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), January 1980. Devaux, F., in Cinéma (Paris), January 1980. *** All through his career Henning Carlsen has been concerned about the relationship between literature and film. Many of his films are based on important novels, but Carlsen has never been satisfied when his films were characterized as adaptations. He wanted to use literary sources as inspirations for works in another medium, works in their own right. Maybe the greatest challenge of his career was his film based on Knut Hamsun’s famous, semi-autobiographical novel Hun- ger, published in 1890. The novel is about a young man, coming from the country to Kristiania, the capital of Norway. He wants to be a writer, but he is suffering from both physical and mental hunger in a hostile city. His sufferings and humiliations lead to hallucinations, and his permanent condition of starvation brings him to the brink of insanity. But his urge to express himself also results in moments of euphoria. The novel is primarily a study about the state of mind of an artistic genius. The transformation of this story, told by the main character in many inner monologues, into film presented intricate problems, which eventually were solved by Carlsen and Peter Seeberg, a highly original Danish author. The two main characters of the book and film are the starving young man and the city. Carlsen, his cameraman Henning Kristiansen, and the set designer Erik Aaes have authentically recreated the cityscape of Kristiania of the 1890s. The establishment of the sur- roundings, where the young man faces his humiliations, shows Carlsen’s experience as a documentary filmmaker. It is a very SUNA NO ONNAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1167 Sult impressive presentation of the place and the time. Less satisfying is the manner in which the young man is integrated into the surround- ings. Part of the problem concerns the character’s view of the city as a prison. The sense of claustrophobia in the film is communicated to us by the use of many close-ups of medium shots, but only results in a confusing orientation of the city. Sult, of course, is Per Oscarsson’s film. His portrait of the budding artist, split between moments of lucidity and moments of darkest despair, is film acting of the highest order. Oscarsson has occupied the mind and the body of his character to such a degree that there is an absolute congruence between the actor and the role, in the physical manifestations and in the inner mental state. It is to Carlsen’s credit that he has coached Oscarsson’s unique talent and Carlsen also shows his ability as an actors’ director in the way he has handled the other actors in the film. As a director he hides behind his actors, though still maintaining control. For example, one of the most magic moments in the film, the love scene between the young man and the girl Ylajali, is a complex mixture of the tragic and the comic, which could only be created by a true artist. —Ib Monty SUNA NO ONNA (Woman in the Dunes) Japan, 1963 Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara Production: Teshigahara Production; black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 127 minutes, some versions are 115 minutes; length: 4,021 meters. Released 1963. Producers: Kiichi Ichikawa and Tadashi Ohno; screenplay: Kobo Abe, from a novel by Kobo Abe; photography: Hiroshi Segawa; editor: Masako Shuzui; art directors: Totetsu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki; music: Toru Takemitsu. Cast: Eiji Okada (Jumpei Niki); Kyoko Kishida (Widow); Koji Mitsui; Sen Yano; Hiroko Ito. Award: Cannes Film Festival, Special Jury Prize, 1964. SUNA NO ONNA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1168 Suna no onna Publications Script: Abe, Kobo, Woman in the Dunes, New York, 1966. Books: Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Tessier, Max, editor, Le Cinéma japonais au présent 1959–1979, Paris, 1980. Jones, Alan, Hiroshi Teshigahara, New York, 1990. Articles: Borde, Raymond, ‘‘Cannes 1964,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 64–65, 1964. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 7 May 1964. Flacon, Michel, in Cinéma (Paris), June 1964. Bory, Jean-Louis, in Arts (Paris), 18 November 1964. Benayoun, Robert, in Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 19 November 1964. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 19 November 1964. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January 1965. Jacob, Gilles, ‘‘Un Beckett nippon,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1965. Cousin, Fabienne, ‘‘Introducing Teshigahara,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), February 1965. Narboni, Jean, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1965. Gauthier, Guy, in Image et Son (Paris), March 1965. ‘‘A Conversation with Two Japanese Film Stars,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1965. Mancia, Adrienne, in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1965. Giles, Dennis, ‘‘The Tao in Woman in the Dunes,’’ in Film Heritage (New York), Spring 1966. Bucher, Felix, ‘‘Akira Kurosawa—Hiroshi Teshigahara,’’ in Cam- era, September 1966. van Oers, F., in Skrien (Amsterdam), May-June 1982. Jackiewicz, Aleksander, ‘‘Moje zycie w kinie,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), vol. 21, no. 2, February 1987. Ahearn, Charlie, ‘‘Teshigahara Zen and Now,’’ in Interview, vol. 20, no. 8, August 1990. Vidal, N., ‘‘La mujer en la arena,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 11, January 1993. SUNRISEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1169 Atkinson, M., ‘‘Against the Grain,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 42, 15 April 1997. Holden, Stephen, in The New York Times, vol. 146, B8 and C8, 11 April 1997. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘Woman in the Dunes,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincin- nati), no. 48, 1998. *** Hiroshi Teshigahara, born in 1927 in Tokyo, is a graduate of the Tokyo Art Institute. The formal beauty of Woman in the Dunes reflects this artistic background. In 1961 he organized his own production company and produced his first feature film, Pitfall, which established him as an avant-garde director. Based on a novel by Kobo Abe, one of Japan’s most respected novelists, Pitfall is a documentary fantasy, according to Teshigahara. Woman in the Dunes, also based on an Abe novel and scripted by him, was Teshigahara’s second feature. The film received much attention outside of Japan. It was awarded the Special Jury Award at Cannes in 1964 and was nomi- nated for an Academy Award. The story of Woman in the Dunes is simple. While on a scientific exploration in the dessert, Jumpei Niki, an entomologist from Tokyo, misses the last bus back to the city. He is given accommodation for the night at the home of a widow at the bottom of a sand pit. Next morning when he is prepared to leave, he discovers that the rope ladder, which is the only means of exit, has been removed by the villagers up above who intend to keep him in the sand pit. The remainder of the film involves Niki’s struggle for freedom, his evolving relationships with the widow, and his final resolution concerning his destiny. As in other films with similar plot situations (Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Luis Bu?uel’s Exterminating Angel), Woman in the Dunes is an allegory. Basically the film deals with man’s confrontation with life and the nature of freedom. Coming out of the tradition of Oriental philosophy, the film is more affirmative than either of the works by Sartre or Bu?uel. Although Niki is representative of all men in general and modern man in particular, he also serves as a specific representative of Japan who has adopted the ways of the Occident. The conflict between Eastern and Western traditions is a recurrent theme in modern Japanese literature. Niki is not only dressed in modern European clothing, but he is infused with the spirit of the West. The opening scenes reveal his obsession with material possessions, with docu- ments and schedules, with the value of a scientific approach to life, and with ambitious desires to get ahead—all antithetical to the notions found in traditional Japanese philosophy and religion. Devoid of any human involvement, Niki exists in a spiritual wasteland as dry and arid as the desert of the opening scenes. Although we are never shown the city, modern man’s environ- ment, Teshigahara skillfully evokes its presence. The opening credits are accompanied by the sounds and noises of the city while images of official stamp marks and fingerprints, an everpresent factor in modern life, are seen on the screen. Niki’s examination of the sand and insects through his magnifying glass typify his distance from an emotional involvement with life itself. He is little more than a microscopic organism, living out his existence as one of the millions who inhabit cities like Tokyo. Yet his arrogance belies his understanding of the true nature of his existence. During the long months which Niki spends in the sand pit, he moves from rebellion against his fate, to accommodation, and ulti- mately to active affirmation. His progress can be gauged by what he gives up—his flask, his camera, his watch, his insect collection, his western clothing, and finally his desire to leave. His gains are emotional involvement, social commitment, and spiritual freedom— for true freedom is an internal state not determined by physical limitations. In order to move forward, it was necessary for Niki to have first taken several steps backward—backward to a more primi- tive state of existence, backward to the values of an earlier era. In order to reach salvation, he has had to return to nature, to find a means to live in harmony with nature, and lastly to accept his position in the true order of the universe. Niki’s acceptance of life in the sand pit is not to be seen as resignation, but rather as a form of enlightenment. Dennis Giles explains in his article on the influence of Taoist philosophy on Woman in the Dunes how the film demonstrates Niki’s acceptance of the Tao: The Tao can be called the path of least resistance. To be in harmony with, not in rebellion against, the fundamen- tal laws of the universe is the first step on the road to Tao. Tao, like water, takes the low-ground. Water has become, perhaps, the most popular taoist symbol. The symbolic value of water is also one of the most striking elements in Woman in the Dunes . . . . Only by remaining passive, receptive, and yielding can the Tao assert itself in the mind. Giles further points out that ‘‘the yielding nature of water is a feminine characteristic, and concave surfaces are also female in nature. Thus the valley, the pit, and the Tao are all feminine.’’ Teshigahara’s camera style is perfectly suited to the allegorical nature of the film. His propensity for close-ups reflects his documen- tary interests and serves to distance the viewer from the characters and to allow the audience to objectively contemplate the universal mean- ings implicit in the story. At the same time Teshigahara creates images of rare abstract beauty which reflect the serenity and harmony implied by the Tao. —Patricia Erens SUNLESS See SANS SOLEIL SUNRISE USA, 1927 Director: F. W. Murnau Production: Fox Film Corporation; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 117 minutes; length: 2,792 meters. Released 29 November 1927, with music by Carli Elinor. Filmed in Fox studios and backlots. SUNRISE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1170 Sunrise Scenario: Carl Mayer, from the novel The Journey to Tilsit by Hermann Sudermann; sub-titles: Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Cald- well; photography: Charles Rosher and Karl Struss; production designers: Rochus Gliese, assisted by Edgar Ulmer and Alfred Metscher; music: Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld. Cast: George O’Brien (The Man—Ansass); Janet Gaynor (The Woman—Indre); Bodil Rosing (The Maid); Margaret Livingstone (The Vamp); J. Farrell Macdonald (The Photographer); Ralph Sipperly (The Hairdresser); Jane Winton (The Manicurist); Arthur Houseman (The Rude Gentleman); Eddie Boland (The Kind Gentleman); Gina Corrado; Barry Norton; Sally Eilers. Awards: Oscars for Best Actress (Gaynor, in conjunction with her roles in 7th Heaven and Street Angel). Cinematography, and Artistic Quality of Production, 1927–28. Publications Script: Mayer, Carl, Sonnenaufgang: Ein Drehbuch mit handschriftlichen Bemerkungen von F. W. Murnau, Wiesbaden, 1971; English- language version included in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Critical Study, by Elliot M. Desilets, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1979. Books: Huff, Theodore, An Index to the Films of F. W. Murnau, Lon- don, 1948. Jacobs, Lewis, editor, Introduction to the Art of the Movies: An Anthology of Ideas on the Nature of Movie Art, New York, 1960. Jameux, Charles, Murnau, Paris, 1965. Anthologie du cinéma 1, Paris, 1966. Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade’s Gone By. . . . London and New York, 1969. Eisner, Lotte, Murnau, Berkeley, 1973. Garbicz, Adam, and Jacek Klinowski, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Harvith, Susan and John, Karl Struss: Man with a Camera, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1976. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. Collier, Jo Leslie, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen, Ann Arbor, 1988. Murnau, Lisbon, 1989. Gehler, Fred, and Ullrich Kasten, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Augsburg, 1990. Fischer, Lucy, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, London, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 24 September 1927. Variety (New York), 28 September 1927. Close Up (London), no. 2, 1928. Murnau, F. W., ‘‘The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles,’’ in Theatre Magazine (New York), January 1928. Blin, Roger, ‘‘Murnau—ses films,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), July 1931. White, Kenneth, ‘‘F. W. Murnau,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), July-September 1931. Jones, Dorothy, in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berke- ley), Spring 1955. Carr, Chauncey, ‘‘Janet Gaynor,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1959. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), May 1962. Douchet, Jean, ‘‘Venise 1962,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1962. Martin, David, ‘‘George O’Brien,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1962. Gilson, René, in Cinéma (Paris), May 1963. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 233, 1969. Haskell, Molly, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Wood, Robin, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. ‘‘L’Aurore (Sunrise) Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June 1974. Bruno, E., in Filmcritica (Rome), July 1974. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1975. Struss, Karl, ‘‘Karl Struss: Man with a Camera,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), March 1977. Marías, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), October 1981. Magill’s Survey of Cinema: Silent Films, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982. SUNRISEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1171 Almendros, Nestor, in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), April 1984. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Secret Affinities: F. W. Murnau,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1988–89. Wood, R., ‘‘Sunrise: A Reappraisal,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Summer 1989. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 3, 1989. Wolf, R., and others, ‘‘De films van F. W. Murnau,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), February-March 1990. Pedler, G., ‘‘Garth’s Vintage Viewing: Murnau’s Sunrise (1927),’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), vol. 194, August 1991. Ramasse, Fran?ois, and Aurélien Ferenczi, ‘‘L’eclaireur allemand: L’aurore,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2346, 28 December 1994. Magny, Jo?l, ‘‘Lumière de l’aurore,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 487, January 1995. Most, M., ‘‘Restoration Film,’’ in Eyepiece (Greenford), vol. 16, no. 6, 1995/1996. Darke, Chris, ‘‘Inside the Light,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 4, April 1996. Klepper, R.K., ‘‘Video Tape Reviews,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), vol. 270, December 1997. Amiel, Vincent, ‘‘Murnau: La chair des images,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 457, March 1999. *** The plot of Sunrise was adapted to Hollywood conventions from a naturalistic novella by Hermann Sudermann. It is wrong, however, to assume the changes were all for the bad, as so many critics have done. The film’s plot is neither hopelessly sentimental nor melodra- matic. It is true that Carl Mayer and F. W. Murnau, with a free hand from the studio, changed the tragic ending of the novella to a happy one for the film. This change can be viewed as an improvement upon Sudermann’s gratuitously ironic ending of having the young hus- band’s death occur after the couple’s reconciliation. If not viewed as an improvement, the popular-art convention of the happy ending is certainly no worse than the naturalistic one of culminating a work with a tragic twist whether it is apt or not. Also the third party of the love triangle was, in the novella, a servant girl and, in the film, is a vamp from the city. On the basis of this change, all too many critics have accused Mayer and Murnau of setting up a simplistic ‘‘good- country’’ and ‘‘evil-city’’ polarity; however, they forget that the couple’s experiences in the city, with all its modern delights, bring the husband and wife back together—or perhaps together for the first time. The plot allowed Murnau to draw upon his background in art history and literature, and above all it offered the basis for a cinematic narrative par excellence. This plot was made for the camera, espe- cially in motion, and for the radical oscillations of lighting and mood that are so conducive to a temporal art like film. In such fertile soil, the talents of cameramen Rosher and Struss flourished. Human characters, in Sunrise, are secondary to the true pro- tagonist—the camera. The scenes in this film are neither conceived as a staged work, like so many silent films, nor as slices of actuality on which the camera allows us to spy. The premise of the film is that the camera will move; and that it will have any excuse to move. Plots and characters seem pretenses for movement and light; boats, dance halls, trolley cars, and other city traffic—not intrigue and love—are the true forces of motion in Sunrise. Akin to the ballets created by the avant- garde in the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, patterns of movement seek their raison d’être in the slimmest threat of plot. In addition, the camera (and the cameramen) have been allowed so much freedom that the camera soon takes on a life of its own. Even when the camera is at rest or pauses within a shot, the effect is electric. According to the testimony of Rosher, Murnau was obsessed with capturing the play of light, especially as it occurred on the surface of the lake—either in nature or in the studio. Water, boats, moonlight, and reeds are pretenses for capturing the fleeting effects of light, much in the same way that clouds and waterlilies are used in Claude Monet’s last paintings. Indeed, the film’s frequent use of mist, dim lighting, and blurred exposures reminds one of Monet’s work. This impressionistic concentration on light is not just limited to the scenes of the lake; in the city, glass replaces water. In the famous restaurant scene, lighted figures are seen dancing behind a glass window; people move in front of the window and are reflected in it; and the camera moves to catch the reflected light from different angles. The effect is shimmering. A frequent complaint concerning Sunrise is that the film is divided into disjointed parts and stylized scenes often clash with more naturalistic ones. Murnau compared his own narrative structure to that used by James Joyce. Just as in Ulysses, there is a radical shift of style to match the spirit of different episodes; so too, in Sunrise, is there a fluctuation between the actual and the artificial. Murnau may have had another source for his scene-structuring in the German Expressionist theatre—especially in the works of Ernst Toller, where naturalistic scenes alternate with expressionistic ones. There are few films that depict such an astute sense of the spirit of place and the events that occur there, as, for example, where the husband secretly meets the vamp, and passes through a studio-set marsh with a broodingly low horizon lit by a moon shining through the haze. Also, the trolley ride taken by the husband and wife gives the sense of a location shot made in daylight; the joyful effect is complete down to the bouncing of the trolley car. The trolley soon moves into the city, actually a studio backlot construction, that is scaled larger than life in order to convey the awe of the country couple who are seeing the city for the first time. The actual only seems to be so. Acting, like the lighting and the sets, is conceived of scene by scene. Murnau took great pains in making the actors’ gestures and facial expressions fit the moment; therefore, the styles of acting fluctuate between the naturalistic and the expressionistic. And over all there is the evermoving mercurial camera. In every way, each scene is contrived to have its own particular mood, and each fits with another like pieces of Byzan- tine mosaic. Hollywood fell under the spell of Sunrise, and under its influence the camera took wings, only to have them clipped by the limitations of primitive sound equipment. In the long run, however, the lessons of Sunrise resurfaced in such films as John Ford’s The Informer and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The camera searching through the night and fog for a reflected gleam of light was a thematic and formalistic motif in these films. On the one hand, Sunrise culminated film’s silent experience; but, on the other, it foreshadowed the first maturity of sound. —Rodney Farnsworth SUNSET BOULEVARD FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1172 SUNSET BOULEVARD USA, 1950 Director: Billy Wilder Production: Paramount Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 110 minutes. Released 1950. Filming completed 18 June 1949 on location in Los Angeles. Producer: Charles Brackett; associate producer: Maurice Schorr, though uncredited; screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D. M. Marshman, Jr., from the story ‘‘A Can of Beans’’ by Brackett and Wilder; photography: John F. Seitz; editor: Arthur Schmidt; editing supervisor: Doane Harrison; sound: Harry Lindgren and John Cope; art directors: Hans Dreier and John Meehan; music: Franz Waxman; songs: Jay Livingston and Ray Evans; special effects: Gordon Jennings; process photography: Farciot Edouart; costume designer: Edith Head. Cast: William Holden (Joe Gillis); Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond); Erich von Stroheim (Max von Mayerling); Nancy Olson (Betty Schaefer); Fred Clark (Sheldrake); Lloyd Gough (Morino); Jack Webb (Artie Green); Franklyn Barnum (Undertaker); Larry Blake (1st finance man); Charles Dayton (2nd finance man); Cecil B. De Mille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H. B. Warner, Ray Evans, Sidney Skolsky, and Jay Livingston play themselves. Awards: Oscars for Best Screenplay and Best Score for a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, 1950. Publications Script: Brackett, Charles, Billy Wilder, and D. M. Marshman, Jr., Sunset Boulevard, in Bianco e Nero (Rome), November-December 1951. Books: del Buono, Oreste, Billy Wilder, Parma, 1958. Madsen, Axel, Billy Wilder, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969. Wood, Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily, New York, 1970. Seidman, Steve, The Film Career of Billy Wilder, Boston, 1977. Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, New York, 1977. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, Hollywood on Hollywood, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979. Dick, Bernard F., Billy Wilder, Boston, 1980. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Thomson, David, Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking, New York, 1981. Koszarski, Richard, The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood, New York, 1983. Bessy, Maurice, Erich von Stroheim, Paris, 1984. Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Gloria Swanson, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1984. Jacob, Jerome, Billy Wilder, Paris, 1988. Seidle, Claudius, Billy Wilder: Seine Filme, sein Leben, Munich, 1988. Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder, New York, 1996. Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, New York, 1998. Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder, New York, 1999. Articles: Agee, James, in Films in Review (New York), May-June 1950. ‘‘Forever Gloria,’’ in Life (New York), 5 June 1950. Newsweek (New York), 26 June 1950. Lightman, Herb A., ‘‘Old Master, New Tricks,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), September 1950. Agee, James, in Sight and Sound (London), November 1950. Houston, Penelope, in Sight and Sound (London), January 1951. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 18 August 1960. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Cast a Cold Eye: The Films of Billy Wilder,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1963. Bodeen, DeWitt, ‘‘Gloria Swanson,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1965. ‘‘The Films of Billy Wilder,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Meet Whiplash Wilder,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1967–68. Nogueira, Rui, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1967–68. Bradbury, Ray, ‘‘The Tiger (poem),’’ in Producers Guild of America Journal (Los Angeles), no. 3, 1976. Colpart, G., in Téléciné (Paris), December 1976. Merigeau, P., in Image et Son (Paris), December 1980. Peary, Danny, in Cult Movies, New York, 1981. Guibert, Hervé, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1981. ‘‘Wilder Issue’’ of Filmcritica (Rome), November-December 1982. Hersant, Y., ‘‘Portrait de la star en singe mort,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1983. Vrdlovec, Z., ‘‘Filmska naratologija,’’ in Ekran (Ljubljana, Yugo- slavia), no. 5–6, 1989. Pichler, O.H., ‘‘Some Like It Black,’’ in Blimp (Graz), no. 18, Fall 1991. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 6, 1991. Kartseva, E., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 3, 1993. Freeman, D., ‘‘Sunset Boulevard Revisited,’’ in New Yorker, 21 June 1993. Elley, D., ‘‘Movie Was Almost Left in Dark,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 351, 19 July 1993. Gerard, J., ‘‘Sunset Boulevard: Still Bumpy,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 353, 20 December 1993. Clarke, Gerald, ‘‘Billy Wilder: Sunset Boulevard’s Creator Talks of the Town,’’ in Architectural Digest (Los Angeles), vol. 51, no. 4, April 1994. Girard, Martin, ‘‘Hollywood Gothique: Sunset Blvd.,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 171, April 1994. SUNSET BOULEVARDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1173 Sunset Boulevard Grob, N., ‘‘Days of the Living Dead,’’ in Filmbulletin (Winterthur), vol. 36, no. 3, 1994. Sandla, R., ‘‘Sunset Dawns on Broadway,’’ in Dance Magazine, vol. 69, February 1995. Premiere (Boulder), vol. 9, February 1996. *** Between 1950 and 1952, Hollywood produced a cycle of classic films that looked at the business of making movies: Singin’ in the Rain, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Sunset Boulevard. Of the three, the latter gives the darkest view of the motion picture industry. The first two films chronicle success and failure, while Sunset Boulevard deals only with decline. It is, in fact, a sort of mirror image of Singin’ in the Rain, a film which was concerned with the problems caused by the coming of sound to the movies. In Singin’ one star deservedly falls from grace with the public, another has his career transformed for the better, while a sweetfaced ingenue becomes a box-office sensation because of her singing. Sunset Boulevard, however, which takes place 25 years after the coming of sound, shows us a silent film star scorned by the changes brought on by the new technology, and a modern day screenwriter whose dialogue is not good enough to get him work. One cannot ignore the film’s autobiographical aspects. Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, the aging silent film star, and like Norma, Swanson’s career declined shortly after the advent of sound. Also, Max, Norma’s chauffeur, had been one of her greatest directors. Erich von Stroheim plays the role and, like Max, he had been one of the more talented directors of the 1920s whose career ended abruptly during the next decade. Completing the mixture of film history and fiction, Norma watches one of her films from 30 years previous; it is Queen Kelly, one of Swanson’s movies that had been directed by von Stroheim. Aside from holding a reflecting glass to the industry, the film itself has something of a mirror construction. After Joe, the screenwriter, meets Norma, she convinces him to work on her comeback project, a ponderous Salome screenplay. Joe agrees because times are hard, and as an added convenience he becomes Norma’s lover. During the second half of the film, Joe meets Betty, and they too begin working on a script as the conventional counterpart to Joe’s involvement with Norma. While Joe knows that Norma’s script is unfilmable, both he and Betty are excited about the script they write together, and shape it THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1174 to the demands of the industry. Joe and Betty also form the normal, attractive movie couple, but Joe and Norma’s relationship stands out as anomalous, at least for films of the period. Norma is much older than Joe, who plays the role of a ‘‘kept man,’’ accepting money, gifts, and a place to live from a woman protector. In the end, jealous of Betty, Norma kills Joe. However, this is known from the beginning, for Sunset Boulevard is a tale told by a dead man. After the opening credits, we see Joe lying face down in Norma’s swimming pool, with detectives trying to fish him out of the water. Joe then begins to narrate the events that led up to the murder. But neither this posthumous narration, nor its baroque film noir style, nor the bitterness with which the film examines Hollywood, made the movie unpalatable to critics of the period. At its release, it was considered a major work, and today Sunset Boulevard remains one of the most highly respected films from the post-World War II period. —Eric Smoodin THE SWEET LIFE See DOLCE VITA THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS USA, 1957 Director: Alexander Mackendrick Production: Norma-Curtleigh Production; black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes, press screening was 103 minutes. Released 27 June 1957 by United Artists. Filmed Spring 1957 in New York City. Producer: James Hill, a Hecht-Hill-Lancaster presentation; screen- play: Clifford Odets, adapted by Ernest Lehman, from the short story ‘‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow’’ by Ernest Lehman; photography: James Wong Howe; editor: Alan Crosland, Jr.; sound: Jack Solo- mon; art director: Edward Carrere; music: Elmer Bernstein. Cast: Burt Lancaster (J. J. Hunsecker); Tony Curtis (Sidney Falco); Susan Harrison (Susan Hunsecker); Sam Levene (Frank D’Angelo); Barbara Nicholls (Rita); Martin Milner (Steve Dallas); Jeff Donnell (Sally); Joseph Leon (Robard); Edith Atwater (Mary); Emile Meyer (Harry Kello); Joe Frisco (Herbie Temple); David White (Otis Elwell); Lawrence Dobkin (Leo Bartha); Lurene Tuttle (Mrs. Bartha); Queenie Smith (Mildred Tam); Autumn Russell (Linda); Jay Adler (Manny Davis); Lewis Charles (Al Evans). Publications Books: Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979. Hunter, Allan, Burt Lancaster: The Man and His Movies, Edin- burgh, 1984. Lacourbe, Roland, Burt Lancaster, Paris, 1987. Kemp, Philip, Alexander Mackendrick, London, 1989. Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, 1991. Articles: Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), June 1957. Weiler, A. H., in New York Times, 27 June 1957. Tallmer, Jerry, in Village Voice (New York), 28 August 1957. Films in Review (New York) August-September 1957. Prouse, Derek, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1957. Rittgers, Carol, in Film Culture (New York), October 1957. ‘‘Alexander Mackendrick,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Janu- ary 1963. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Oddities and One-Shots,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1963. Schuster, Mel, ‘‘Burt Lancaster,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1969. ‘‘Mackendrick Issue’’ of Dialogue on Film (Washington, D.C.), no. 2, 1972. Blackburn, Richard, ‘‘Bullies of Broadway,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), December 1983. Denby, D., ‘‘The Best Movie,’’ in New York Magazine, vol. 18, 23/30 December 1985. Kemp, Philip, ‘‘Mackendrick Land,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 58, no. 1, Winter 1988–89. Denby, D., ‘‘The Lullaby of Broadway,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 4, April 1991. Lane, Anthony, ‘‘No Illusions: Movie Director Alexander Mackendrick,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 69, no. 48, 31 January 1994. Buford, K., ‘‘Do Make Waves: Sandy,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, no. 3, May-June 1994. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Once Upon a Time in Times Square,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 39, 22 November 1994. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 30, 1997. Roddam, Franc, ‘‘Power, Corruption and Lies,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 1, January 1997. Dzenis, A., in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 113/114, 1998. *** One of the most original and off-beat films to be labelled a film noir, The Sweet Smell of Success takes a cynical bite at the underbelly of the New York publicity game. As Sidney Falco, a thoroughly ruthless and utterly amoral press agent scrambling for his place in the sun, Tony Curtis gives the performance of his career—charming yet sleazy, ingratiating yet duplicitous. Falco aspires to a position of influence in the orbit of J. J. Hunsecker, king of the gossip pen. As impeccably played by Burt Lancaster, Hunsecker is a smooth, cold- blooded mudslinger; crewcut, single and implicitly gay; more ruth- less than Falco, yet completely unsullied. The bittersweet irony of the film is that, for all of Falco’s slimy dealings, it is he (and his type) who ends up doing Hunsecker’s dirty work. To curry Hunsecker’s favor, Falco sets out to break up the relationship between the columnist’s sister (to whom Hunsecker has more than a brotherly attachment) and a young jazz musician by circulating accusations that the musician is a Communist and a drug SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1175 The Sweet Smell of Success addict. It is a premise which provides screenwriter Clifford Odets the perfect opportunity to mount a scathing exposé of the lying, black- mailing, pimping and full-fledged witchhunting involved in the daily abuse of media power. It also provides the material from which British director Alexander Mackendrick is able to render a taut, suspenseful film in which the violence is more psychological than physical; and to create the ambience of a glamorous nocturnal world which is rotting at the core. These elements alone are enough to make The Sweet Smell of Success one of the most cynical film noirs of the 1950s; but it is the superb black-and-white cinematography of James Wong Howe which earns the film its place among the classics of the genre. Shooting much of the film at night on the streets of New York, Howe manages to combine expressive lighting with a kind of vérité realism, anticipating by several years the crystalline location cinematography of Henri Decae and Raoul Coutard in the early films of the French New Wave. If the subject of The Sweet Smell of Success seems unusual for a film noir, its biting tone and duplicitous charac- ters represent the form at its most scathing, and its visual style points ahead from 1940s expressionism toward the direction of Alphaville. —Ed Lowry SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG USA, 1971 Director: Melvin Van Peebles Production: Yeah; color, 35mm; running time: 97 minutes. Released January 1971, USA. Cost: $500,000. Distributed by Image Entertain- ment (laserdisc), Xenon Entertainment Group, Direct Cinema Lim- ited (video), and Cinemation Industries. Producers: Jerry Gross, Melvin Van Peebles; screenplay: Melvin Van Peebles; cinematography: Bob Maxwell; assistant director: Clyde Houston; editor: Melvin Van Peebles; sound editors: John Newman, Luke Wolfram; musical score: Melvin Van Peebles; production manager: Clyde Houston; original music: Earth Wind and Fire; special effects: Cliff Wenger; makeup supervisor: Nora Maxwell. SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1176 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Cast: Melvin Van Peebles (Sweetback); Simon Chuckster (Beetle); Hubert Scales (Moo Moo); John Dullaghan (Commissioner); Rhetta Hughes (Old Girl Friend); Mario Van Peebles (Young Sweetback); West Gale; Niva Rochelle; Nick Ferrari; Ed Rue; Johnny Amos; Lavelle Roby; Ted Hayden; Sonja Dunson; Michael Agustus; Peter Russell; Norman Fields; Ron Prince; Steve Cole; Megan Van Peebles; Joe Tornatore; Mike Angel; Jeff Goodman; Curt Matson; Marria Evonee; Jon Jacobs; Bill Kirschner; Vincent Barbi; Chet Norris; Joni Watkins; Jerry Days; John Allen; Bruce Adams; Brer Soul. Publications Books: Van Peebles, Melvin, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, New York, 1971. Leab, Daniel, From Sambo to Superspade, Boston, 1976. Guerrero, Ed, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Philadelphia, 1993. James, Darius (a.k.a. Dr. Snakeskin), That’s Blaxploitation! Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury), New York, 1995. Martinez, Gerald, Diana Martinez, and Andres Chavez, What It Is . . . What It Was! The Black Film Explosion of the 70s in Words and Pictures, New York, 1998. Articles: Newton, Huey, ‘‘He Won’t Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’,’’ in Black Panther, no. 6, 19 January 1971. Riley, Clayton, ‘‘What Makes Sweetback Run?’’ in New York Times, May 9, 1971. Riley, Clayton, ‘‘A Black Movie for White Audiences?’’ in New York Times, July 29, 1971. Bennett, Jr., Lerone, ‘‘The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,’’ in Ebony, no. 26, September 1971. Lee, Don, ‘‘The Bittersweet of Sweetback, or, Shake Yo Money Maker,’’ in Black World, November 1971. SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1177 Broun, Hale, ‘‘Is It Better to Be Shaft Than Uncle Tom?’’ in New York Times, 26 August 1973. Peavy, Charles, ‘‘Black Consciousness and the Contemporary Cin- ema,’’ in Popular Culture and the Expanding Consciousness, edited by Ray Browne, New York, 1973. *** In 1970, Melvin Van Peebles—along with Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis, one of the first African-American filmmakers to find work in Hollywood—directed a moderately successful serio-comedy entitled Watermelon Man, about a white bigot who suddenly finds himself in the body of a black man. With the $70,000 he earned from that film, plus additional funds from a number of independent sources (including a $50,000 emergency loan from Bill Cosby), Van Peebles was able to finance his new project, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—so named in order to solicit at least a modicum of coverage from the mainstream media. Desperate to keep production costs to a minimum, he signed a deal with Cinemation Industries, a small distributor specializing in low-budget exploitation fare, and pre- tended to be making a porno flick, a move which enabled him to hire black and nonunion crewmen. In addition, Van Peebles wrote, directed, scored, and starred in the film, which was not only a sound decision economically, but one which ensured his creative control over every facet of production. Early in 1971, Sweetback opened in the only two theaters (in Detroit and Atlanta) that would agree to show it on a first-run basis. By the end of the year, the film had become the most profitable independent production in history to that point; a sleeper hit across the nation, it would wind up grossing over $15 million. On the one hand, Sweetback is a film so original in both concep- tion and realization that it managed to defy all traditional genre expectations, thereby satisfying the desire (at least temporarily) for a popular alternative to the dominant Hollywood paradigm. On the other hand, Sweetback is a film that borrows narrative threads and conventions from an assortment of different genres (including the chase film, the biker film, and soft-core porno), thereby proving itself a forerunner of those ‘‘postmodern’’ hybrids so prevalent in theaters today. Finally, Sweetback is a film whose staggering and completely unexpected commercial success ensured its place at the head of an explosion in black-marketed, black-cast, and/or black-directed pro- ductions, an explosion that soon went by the ambivalent name of ‘‘Blaxploitation cinema.’’ Sweetback makes manifest its revolutionary pretensions with the following words, which appear at the bottom of the screen before the opening credits role: ‘‘This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the Man.’’ The shocking first scene finds a pre-teen Sweetback (played by Melvin’s son, Mario Van Peebles) working in a whorehouse, where a grateful call-girl screams out his nickname during orgasm. Though some viewers found sym- bolic beauty here (Black Panther leader Huey Newton went so far as to claim that the woman ‘‘in fact baptizes [Sweetback] into his true manhood’’), others in the African-American community, such as Ebony reviewer Lerone Bennett, Jr., felt that Sweetback’s initiation is not so much an ‘‘act of love’’ as ‘‘the rape of a child by a 40-year-old prostitute.’’ We next observe (the now grown-up) Sweetback per- forming as a stud in a black-run sex show in South-Central Los Angeles. On his way to a police station, where he is scheduled to stand in temporarily as a suspect in a widely-publicized murder case, his two guards stop to detain a black activist (Moo Moo, played by Hubert Scales) and proceed to beat the young man senseless. Having seen enough/too much, Sweetback jumps the officers, and nearly kills them with his handcuffs. The rest of the movie tracks our hero’s progress as he rides, runs, and hitches his way through decaying cityscapes in a desperate effort at avoiding capture. At one point, Sweetback has his life threatened by a motorcycle gang, and only manages to survive by winning a public sex duel with the female leader. And that is just the beginning; as Ed Guerrero describes it, Sweetback ‘‘evades the police by raping a Black woman at knifepoint at a rock concert, spears a cop with a pool cue, kills a number of dogs tracking him, heals himself with his own urine, and bites off the head of a lizard before escaping across the Mexicn border into the desert.’’ The film concludes on an ominous note for white audiences, as the words ‘‘A Baadasssss nigger is coming to collect some dues’’ flash across the screen. Although neither the popularity of Sweetback at the time of its release, nor its influence on future black filmmakers, can possibly be denied, its legacy—as well as that of Blaxploitation cinema generally— remains a matter of controversy to this day. In interviews, as well as in the promotional book accompanying its theatrical release, Van Peebles called the film ‘‘revolutionary,’’ as it tells the story of a ‘‘bad nigger’’ who mounts a successful challenge against the oppressive white power system. This view was supported by Newton, who devoted an entire issue of the Black Panther party newspaper to Sweetback. Bill Cosby has reportedly called the film a work of genius. And a number of African-American intellectuals sought to add Sweetback’s name to the roll call of black folkloric heroes in virtue of his prodigious virility. On the negative side, Bennett argued in a scathing review that the film serves to romanticize the poverty and wretchedness of the ghetto, that Sweetback is a self-serving, apolitical individualist rather than a revolutionary, and that the protagonist’s sexploitative con- struction actually reinforces negative African-American male stereo- types. These criticisms were seconded by, among others, Black nationalist author and poet Haki R. Madhubuti. Unfortunately, what tends to get lost in the heated debates sur- rounding Sweetback’s socio-political ‘‘message’’ is an acknowledg- ment and consideration of Van Peeble’s innovative directorial style. By making creative use of such techniques as montage, superimposition, freeze frames, jump cuts, zoom-ins, split-screen editing, stylized dialogue, multiply-exposed scenes, and a soulful musical score by the black rock group Earth Wind and Fire, Van Peebles broke new ground and challenged viewers’ expectations. All of this should make obvi- ous the point that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is not just a statement, protest, or historical oddity, but a unique cinematic experience for people of all colors to reflect upon, appreciate, and enjoy. —Steven Schneider 1179 T DAS TAGEBUCH EINER VERLORENEN (Diary of a Lost Girl) Germany, 1929 Director: G. W. Pabst Production: Hom-Film; black and white, silent; running time: 130 minutes. Producer: G. W. Pabst; screenplay: Rudolf Leonhardt, based on the novel by Margarethe Boehme; photography: Sepp Algeier; assist- ant directors: Marc Sorkin and Paul Falknberg; art directors: Erno Metzner and Emil Hasler. Cast: Louise Brooks (Thymiane Henning); Josef Rovensky (Robert Henning); Fritz Rasp (Meinert); Edith Meinhard (Erika); Vera Pawlowa (Aunt Frieda); Franziska Kinz (Meta); Andre Roanne (Count Osdorff); Arnold Korff (Elder Count Osdorff); Andrews Engelmann (Director of the reform school). Publications Books: Borde, Raymond, and others, Le cinema realiste allemand, Lausanne, 1965. Amengual, Barthelemy, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Paris, 1966. Atwell, Lee, G. W. Pabst, Boston, 1977. Brooks, Louise, Lulu in Hollywood, New York, 1977. Groppali, Enrico, Georg W. Pabst, Firenze, 1983. Rentschler, Eric, editor, The Films of G.W. Pabst, Piscataway, 1990. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, G.W. Pabst, Berlin, 1997. Articles: Interim, L., ‘‘La fille perdue et retrouvée,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1982. Lefèvre, R., Image et Son (Paris), January 1982. Petat, J., Cinéma (Paris), January 1982. Kral, P., ‘‘Par-dela le bien et le mal,’’ in Positif (Paris), Febru- ary 1982. Milne, T., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1982. Petley, J., Films and Filming (London), December 1982. Schlüpmann, Heide, ‘‘Das Bordell als arkadischer Ort?: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen von G.W. Pabst,’’ in Frauen und Film (Frank- furt am Main), no. 43, December 1987. Sarris, Andrew, in Video Review, vol. 11, no. 11, February 1991. Clark, Jeff, in Library Journal, vol. 116, no. 4, 1 March 1991. Cox, T., ‘‘Diary of a Lost Spectator: Carving a Space for Female Desire in Patriarchal Cinema,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 16, no. 1, 1996. Schluepmann, H., ‘‘Spending Money on Laughter,’’ in Cinegrafie (Ancona), vol. 6, no. 10, 1997. Knop, M., ‘‘The Brothel as a Convalescent Home,’’ in Cinegrafie (Ancona), vol. 6, no. 10, 1997. *** American actress Louise Brooks achieved stardom after abandon- ing Hollywood, where she was most frequently cast as a flapper in an unvaried array of cinematic concoctions. Brooks opted for the artisti- cally richer pastures of Europe—where she teamed with the great German director G. W. Pabst for a pair of scandalous films, Pan- dora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, that packed movie houses and outraged the censors on several continents in the waning days of the silent cinema. Based on Frank Wedekind’s play of the same name, Pandora’s Box, the movie highlights Brooks as the alluring Lulu, who uses her considerable beauty and sexual charms to get ahead, destroying the lives of several men in the process. Lulu gets her comeuppance at the hands of Jack the Ripper when her wanton ways reduce her to a life of prostitution on the streets of London. The film caused a sensation for its remarkable frankness and potent images of an amoral society swamped in sin and perversity. But it was but a harbinger of things to come from the Brooks-Pabst team. Their follow-up collaboration, Diary of a Lost Girl, caused even more a furor. Pabst cast Brooks not as a sexual predator this time around but as a waif whose repeated victimization by men leads her into a life of prostitution. She triumphs in the end—at least in the sense that she suffers no retribution for the sinful life she, however involuntarily, has been forced to pursue. Diary of a Lost Girl pushed the envelope of sexual frankness on the screen even further than Pandora’s Box with its earthy look inside the daily, not just nightly, workings of a brothel and the candor of its seduction scenes. These scenes were presented symbolically rather than graphically, but their content was no less clear. For example, when Brooks’s character, Thymiane, is carried to bed by her first seducer (Fritz Rasp), her swaying legs knock a glass of red wine off a nightstand, splashing the dark liquid across the sheets—an unmistakable visual metaphor for the subsequent taking of her virginity. Such a hue and cry arose among contemporary watchdog groups on both sides of the Atlantic that this scene was cut. Other equally potent scenes were altered so that the film could be released. The film’s original sins-go- unpunished ending was also changed. By simply chopping the ending off and letting the film conclude, albeit somewhat abruptly, at a low TA’M E GUILASS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1180 Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen point in Thymiane’s travails, it suggests if not outright penance, at least a pattern of continued woe in the character’s life. Fortunately, the print of Diary of a Lost Girl that is in circulation and available for appraisal today is, for the most part, Pabst’s original cut and not the butchered version. Had Louise Brooks and G. W. Pabst continued working together, they might have enjoyed the ongoing success of that later actress- director duo, Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, whose pairing on a number of steamy extravaganzas the Brooks-Pabst team- up somewhat anticipated. But after making one more film in France for another director, Brooks returned to her native country to resume the stalled Hollywood career which had spurred her to seek fame, fortune—and better roles in better films—in Europe. By then the talkies had arrived to finish off the careers of many a silent screen superstar. Brooks was not one of them. It was not the advent of sound that drove her from the screen, but her unwillingness to pick up her career where it left off. She demanded the kinds of roles in the kinds of arty films that made her a name in Europe. What she was offered instead was froth, and she retired from the screen permanently in 1933. G. W. Pabst fared little better. Although he continued directing movies until 1956, his work never again achieved the acclaim or the notoriety Pandora’s Box and, especially, Diary of a Lost Girl had brought him. —John McCarty TA’M E GUILASS (Taste of Cherry) Iran, 1997 Director: Abbas Kiarostami Production: Abbas Kiarostami Productions, CiBy 2000 (France); color, 35mm; running time: 99 minutes in UK, 96 minutes in Argentina, and 95 minutes in Iran and USA. First released 10 October 1997, Italy; 20 March 1998, USA. Language: Farsi with English subtitles. Filmed in Tehran and its outskirts. TA’M E GUILASSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1181 Producer: Abbas Kiarostami; screenplay: Abbas Kiarostami; pho- tography: Homayoon Payvar; assistant directors: Hassan Yekta Panah, Bahman Kiarostami; editor: Abbas Kiarostami; sound: Jahangir Mirshekari; art director: Hassan Yekta Panah; special effects: Asadollah Majidi; title design: Mehdi Samakar; assistant camera- man: Farshad Bashir Zadeh; sound assistant: Sassan Bagherpour; cameraman: Alireza Ansarian; mixer: Mohamadreza Delpak. Cast: Homayoun Ershadi (Mr. Badii); Abdolhosein Bagheri (Mr. Bagheri, taxidermist in Natural History Museum); Afshin Khorshid Bakhtari (soldier); Safar Ali Moradi (soldier from Kurdistan); Mir Hossein Noori (seminarian); Ahmad Ansari (guard in the tower); Hamid Masoumi (man in telephone booth); Elham Imani (woman near the museum); Ahmad Jahangiri (blacksmith); Nasrolah Amini (gravel pit worker); Sepideh Askari, Davood Forouzanfar (passen- gers in VW car); Iraj Alidoost, Rahman Rezai, Hojatolah Sarkeshi (museum ticket personnel); Ali Noornajafi (soldier from Ilam); Kianoosh Zahedi Panah, Gholam Reza Farahani, Morteza Yazdani, Moghadam, Ali Reza Abdollah Nejad, Akbar Khorasani, Hossain Mehdikhah, Ghorban Cheraghi, Ali Akbar Torabi, Seyed Mehdi Mirhashemi, Amir Reza Zendeh Ali, Abootaleb Moradi (soldiers from Tehran); Mehdi Bastami (soldier from Shahrood); Mohamad Aziz Ghasaei (soldier from Hast-par); Karim Rostami (soldier from Khalkhal); Kambiz Baradaran, Valliolah Halzaei (soldiers from Kermanshah); Ali Ghanbari, Jalal Ghafari, Ahmad Jozie, Ali Asghar Seyedi (soldiers from Hamedan); Ali Reza Bayat (soldier from Toysarkaran); Klanoosh Yooshan-Lou (soldier from Bandar Anzali); Ali Tabee Ahamadi (soldier from Ahwaz); Jamshid Torabi, Gholam Reza Fattahi (soldiers from Karaj); Ali Akbar Abbasi (soldier from Qom); Rahim Imanie (soldier from Ardabil); Ali Mohammad Moravati (soldier from Takab); Ali Mohammad Rezaei, Mahmood Reza Edalati (soldiers from Malayer); Seyyed Javad Navabi (soldier from Arak). Awards: Palme d’Or (shared with Shohei Imamura’s Unagi [The Eel]), Cannes Film Festival, 1997; Best Foreign Language Film, Boston Society of Film Critics, 1998; nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Chicago Film Critics Association, 1999. Publications Articles: Cheshire, Godfrey, ‘‘Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Questions,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 4, July-August 1996. Lopate, Phillip, ‘‘Kiarostami Close Up,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 4, July-August 1996. Hamid, Nassia, ‘‘Near and Far: Director Abbas Kiarostami Talks about Images from ‘Through the Olive Trees’ and His Career,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 2, February 1997. Ditmars, Hadani, ‘‘Talking Too Much With Men: From Angels in Paris to Martyrs in Tehran, Hadani Ditmars on Iranian Directors and the Fajr Film Festival,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 4, April 1997. Roddick, Nick, ‘‘Cannes Notes,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 7, July 1997. Corliss, Mary, ‘‘Cannes at 50,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 4, July-August 1997. Lopate, Phillip, ‘‘New York,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 6, November-December 1997. Graffy, Julian, ‘‘A Taste of Cherry/Ta’ame-gilas,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 8, no. 6, June 1998. Mulvey, Laura, ‘‘Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 8, no. 6, June 1998. Films: Interview with Abbas Kiarostami, in Friendly Persuasion, directed by Jamsheed Akrami, forthcoming. *** Jean-Luc Godard reportedly said, ‘‘Cinema starts with Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.’’ His admiration for the Iranian director, expressed when Abbas Kiarostami accepted the Palme d’Or for Taste of Cherry at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is shared by many within the international film community. When Taste of Cherry gained world-wide attention by becoming the first Iranian film to win the top prize at Cannes, Kiarostami was introduced to a wider audience as one of the most original, thought-provoking artists of contemporary cinema. Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami’s eloquent meditation on life and death, is a sublime masterpiece. Like other Kiarostami films, the simple parable focuses on a jour- ney. A seemingly affluent middle-aged man, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), drives a white Range Rover around the hilly outskirts of Tehran in search of someone who will accept his job offer. He wants to hire a man for 200,000 tomans, the amount of money a soldier would receive for six months work. That person would accompany him to a predetermined grave site and return there the next morning to bury his dead body, if he succeeds in committing suicide, or to help him to his feet if he is still alive. His anguish is never explained. As Mr. Badii’s car repeatedly loops along the narrow road, one wonders if he will choose the route to death or turn left and take the ‘‘longer but better and more beautiful’’ road towards the spirited city of Tehran. Is this the road to life? The narrative piques the spectator’s curiosity. Who is this brood- ing man and what does he want? The enigmatic protagonist ap- proaches an assortment of ordinary people and invites each to take a ride with him: Afghans, Kurds, Turks, a young soldier, a security guard, an Islamic seminarian, and a museum employee. Mr. Badii very gradually reveals his suicidal intent—a taboo subject in the Islamic republic—to his passengers and to his audience. The impov- erished Kurdish soldier bolts from the vehicle, the seminary student lectures on Muslim strictures against suicide, and the elderly museum taxidermist formulates a persuasive philosophical argument before agreeing to help him. Their reactions keep the arguments about life and death in perfect balance. To be or not to be? Taste of Cherry respectfully explores different points of view, raising questions rather than providing answers. Despite its metaphysical concerns, the film is persistently earthbound. When Mr. Badii is in transit, the camera is largely confined to the car and close-ups of the driver and his passengers. Each has his own space, and the one-shots emphasize individual isolation. At other times the camera pulls back for long shots of soldiers marching through the parched countryside or of workers moving piles of red dirt with heavy equipment. Often taken from Mr. Badii’s point of view, these shots connect him to the environment and the teeming vitality of earthly life. The powerful visual imagery, accompanied by the howling wind or punctuated by the wail of TAMPOPO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1182 animals, presents the bleak but beautiful landscape as a place of social meaning, and, perhaps, a metaphor for the human condition. Taste of Cherry is at once consistent with Kiarostami’s previous work and a risky departure. Similar to And Life Goes On . . . (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), a mythic quest leads to personal transformation. A minimal storyline, the use of structural repetition, and poetic images are Kiarostami trademarks. Working with a modest budget and under government control, the Iranian director managed to reinvent neorealism in the context of the art film. In the tradition of postwar Italian filmmakers, he coaxed strikingly natural perform- ances from nonactors and shot on-location in and around Tehran. But Kiarostami’s realist sensibilities, which foster comparisons between his work and Vittorio De Sica’s humanist cinema, intersect with the grand themes, intellectual complexity, and formalist concerns associ- ated with art cinema. The simplicity and spiritual intensity of Taste of Cherry recall the films of Ozu, Dreyer, and Bresson. Kiarostami’s cinema is highly self-reflexive, making excellent use of distanciation devices to remind viewers that they are ‘‘only’’ watching a film. In Where Is My Friend’s House (1987) and Close-Up (1989), Kiarostami addresses the filmmaking process itself, making a distinction between the real world and the reconstructed reality of cinema. At the beginning of Through the Olive Trees, Kiarostami has an actor turn to the camera and say, ‘‘I am the man who is playing the director of this film’’ and in And Life Goes On . . . , the script girl interrupts a scene to hand an actor a glass of water. So the film crew’s appearance at the end of Taste of Cherry is more than the director’s whim. This reminder about the movie’s artifice encourages audiences to think about the film’s open ending and to confront the intellectual issues on their terms. As Kiarostami stated in a February 1997 Sight and Sound interview, ‘‘The filmmaker can only raise questions, and it is the audience who should seek the answer, should have the opportu- nity for reflection . . . to complete the unfinished part of a work. So there are as many different versions of the same film as there are members of a given audience.’’ Only one interpretation, however, can be inferred from the tossed- off remark that provides the film’s title. Before the taxidermist of the Natural History Museum agrees to assist Mr. Badii, he tells of his own suicide attempt. Years ago he had thrown a rope over a mulberry tree with the intent of hanging himself. Suddenly he noticed the rising sun, the beauty of his surroundings, and the cries of children begging him to shake the tree so that they could eat the fallen mulberries. Simple pleasures—including the succulent berries—reclaimed his zest for life. Although the older man credits a mulberry for saving him, he asks Mr. Badii, ‘‘You want to give up the taste of cherries?’’ By refusing to reveal the answer, Abbas Kiarostami allows us to savor the sensuous and intellectual pleasures of his film. —Susan Tavernetti TAMPOPO Japan, 1986 Director: Juzo Itami Production: Itami Productions, New Century Producers; colour, 35mm; running time: 114 minutes. Producer: Juzo Itami, Yasushi Tamaoki, Seigo Hosogoe; screen- play: Juzo Itami; photography: Masaki Tamura; editor: Akira Suzuki; assistant directors: Kazuki Skiroyama, Kubota Nobuhiro, Suzuki Kenji; art director: Takeo Kimura; music: Kunihiko Murai; sound: Fumio Hashimoto; food design: Izumi Ishimori; cooking stylist: Seiko Ogawa. Cast: Tsutomu Yamazaki (Goro); Nobuko Miyamoto (Tampopo); Koji Yakusho (Gangster); Ken Watanabe (Gun); Rikiya Yasuoka (Pisken); Kinzo Sakura (Shohei); Manpei Ikeuchi (Tabo); Yoshi Kato (Sensei). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 3 September 1986. Magny, J., ‘‘A la recherche de la nouille absolue,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema (Paris), December 1987. Freiberg, F., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), March 1988. Rayns, T., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1988. Stanbrook, A., ‘‘Ronin with a Roguish Grin,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1988. Niel, P., ‘‘De la substantifique molle des nouilles nippones,’’ in Positif (Paris), May 1988. O’Conner, Patricia T., in The New York Times, vol. 137, H30, 17 July 1988. Lavigne, N., Sequences (Montreal), September 1988. Seesslen, Georg, ‘‘Tampopo,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 6, no. 6, June 1989. *** Japanese writer-director Juzo Itami combines slapstick with light- as-a-feather whimsy of the Bill Forsyth school in this decidedly unusual blend of genres. The plot centers on the quest of a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) to master the art of cooking the perfect noodle dish. She is guided, spiritually and otherwise, in her quest by a helpful truck driver (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a Clint Eastwood type who is strong, but not silent in his persistent tutelage. In addition to Eastwood, Yamazaki’s character is modeled on and a parody of the energetic samurai warriors in Akira Kurosawa’s epics and every gunslinger who came to the rescue of the widow woman in every American western ever made. He first meets Miyamoto when he stops at her restaurant for a bite and is turned off by the unsavoriness of her noodle recipe (due mostly to lack of proper boiling) and the rough, undiscriminating trade that frequents her restaurant. These goons beat him to a pulp in an offscreen rumble outside her place. Taken with his strength and courage, she nurses his wounds and he stays on to improve her culinary skills and bring her more upscale business by putting her through a rigorous training program that parodies the classic Oriental quest for enlightenment through suffering. Itami shifts back and forth between this framing story and a series of vignettes involving gangsters, a class in the proper etiquette of eating spaghetti, the techniques of professional noodle tasting and other odds and ends. The subject that links these disparate set pieces is food, and sometimes sex—occasionally both at once, as in an TAXI DRIVERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1183 Tampopo amusingly kinky scene where an amorous couple gets it on in a hotel room over an elegantly prepared evening meal, using the various courses as sex aids. The film’s opening scene set in a movie theatre before the lights go down where an irate member of the audience admonishes his fellow patrons for always crinkling their snack wrappers and chewing their potato chips and popcorn too loudly during the show is also quite funny. It’s a situation with which anyone who has ever gone to a movie can easily identify. As one might expect from a film about the fine art of food preparation, the screen is awash in mouthwatering images that rival the alluring color photos in an average issue of Bon Appetit. Tampopo is clearly not meant for viewers on diets, for it is guaranteed to make you hungry. The humor is simultaneously zany and yet so slyly understated that you’re not always sure whether Itami is trying to tickle your ribs or pull your leg. Most American critics felt him to be aiming at the former and Tampopo wound up on the annual Top Ten Film lists of 23 of them, including the reviewers of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine. Siskel and Ebert gave it a thumbs up, calling it ‘‘brilliant and wacky.’’ But the New York Daily News reviewer said it best, calling the film a ‘‘one-of-a-kind, true original.’’ For that it definitely is. —John McCarty TASTE OF CHERRY See TA’M E GUILASS TAXI DRIVER USA, 1976 Director: Martin Scorsese Production: Bill/Phillips Production, an Italo-Judeo Production; Metrocolor, 35mm; running time: 113 minutes. Released 1976 by Columbia Pictures. Filmed 1975 in New York City. TAXI DRIVER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1184 Taxi Driver Producers: Michael Phillips and Julia Phillips with Phillip M. Goldfarb; screenplay: Paul Schrader; photography: Michael Chap- man; editors: Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro; editing supervisor: Marcia Lucas; sound: Roger Pietschman and Tex Rudloff; art director: Charles Rosen; music: Bernard Herrmann; costume de- signer: Ruth Morley; visual consultant: David Nichols; creative consultant: Sandra Weintraub. Cast: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle); Cybill Shepherd (Betsy); Jodie Foster (Iris); Harvey Keitel (Sport); Leonard Harris (Charles Palantine); Peter Boyle (Wizard); Albert Brooks (Tom); Murray Mosten (Time- keeper); Richard Higgs (Secret Service Agent); Vic Aro (Melio, deli owner); Steven Prince (Gun salesman); Martin Scorsese (Taxi pas- senger); Dianne Abbot (Concession girl). Awards: New York Film Critics Award, Best Actor (De Niro), 1976; Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 1976. Publications Books: Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979. Ray, Robert B., A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930–1980, Princeton, 1985. Arnold, Frank, and others, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Bliss, Michael, Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro, Lon- don, 1986. Cietat, Michel, Martin Scorsese, Paris, 1986. Domecq, Jean-Philippe, Martin Scorsese: Un Rêve Italo-Américain, Renens, Switzerland, 1986. McKay, Keith, Robert De Niro: The Hero Behind the Masks, New York, 1986. Weiss, Ulli, Das Neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986. Weiss, Marian, Martin Scorsese: a Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1987. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese, Philadelphia, 1990. Schrader, Paul, Schrader on Schrader, edited by Kevin Jackson, New York, 1992. Connelly, Marie Katheryn, Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films, With a Filmography of His Entire Directorial Career, Jefferson, 1993. Bliss, Michael, The Word Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin Scorsese, Lanham, 1995, 1998. Friedman, Lawrence S., The Cinema of Martin Scorsese, New York, 1997. Kelly, Mary P., Martin Scorsese: A Journey, New York, 1997. Pezzotta, Alberto, Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, Torino, 1997. Dougan, Andy, Martin Scorsese - Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998. Brunette, Peter, editor, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Jackson, 1999. Articles: Filmfacts (Los Angeles), no. 1, 1976. Rice, J. C., ‘‘Transcendental Pornography and Taxi Driver,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Bowling Green, Ohio), no. 2, 1976. Golchan, F., ‘‘Paul Schrader,’’ in Cinematographe (Paris), June 1976. Rubinstein, L., in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1976. Eder, K., ‘‘Rebel Heroes der 70er Jahre: Kontaklos und gewalttaetig: zu zwei Filmen von Martin Scorsese,’’ in Medium (Frankfurt), July 1976. Racheva, M., and K. Eder, ‘‘Taxi Driver: Gespraecch mit Drehbuchator Paul Schrader,’’ in Medium (Frankfurt), July 1976. Renaud, T., in Cinéma (Paris), July 1976. Chavardes, B., in Téléciné (Paris), July-August 1976. Renaud, T., in Cinéma (Paris), July 1976. Kane, P., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1976. Amata, C., ‘‘Scorsese on Taxi Driver,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Summer-Autumn 1976. Cowie, Peter, in Focus on Film (London), Summer-Autumn 1976. Coleman, John, in New Statesman (London), 20 August 1976. Beard, D., ‘‘Mindless Audience Reaction,’’ in Cinema Canada (Montreal), October 1976. Desrues, H., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. Thompson, R., ‘‘Screenwriter: Taxi Driver’s Paul Schrader,’’ in Fernseh-und-kino-Technik (Berlin), October 1976. Giuricin, G., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), November-December 1976. Hosman, H., ‘‘Een eindeloos verhaal zonder punten en komma’s: de films van Martin Scorsese,’’ in Skoop (Amsterdam), February- March 1977. TENI ZABYTYKH PREDKOVFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1185 Rule, P., ‘‘The Italian Connection in the American Film: Coppola, Cimino, Scorsese,’’ in America (New York), 17 November 1979. Mitchell, Robert, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Wood, Robin, ‘‘The Incoherent Text: Narrative Texts in the 70s,’’ in Movie (London), Winter-Spring 1980–81. Sharrett, C., ‘‘The American Apocalypse: Scorsese’s Taxi Driver,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth, New York), Summer 1984. Bruce, Bryan, ‘‘Martin Scorsese: Five Films,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1986. Lane, J., ‘‘Martin Scorsese and the Documentary Impulse,’’ in Framework (London), no. 1, 1991. Vickers, N. J., ‘‘Lyric in the Video Decade,’’ in Discourse (Bloom- ington, Indiana), Fall 1993. Norman, Barry, in Radio Times (London), vol. 266, no. 3736, 26 August 1995. Quart, L., ‘‘A Slice of Delirium: Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Revisited,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 3, 1995. Maslin, Janet, in The New York Times, vol. 145, C12, 16 Febru- ary 1996. Taubin, Amy, ‘‘A Checkered Past,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 41, 20 February 1996. Scorsese, Martin, ‘‘De Nero & Moi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 500, March 1996. Everschor, Franz, ‘‘20 Jahre nach Travis Bickle,’’ in Film-Dienst (Cologne), vol. 49, no. 7, 26 March 1996. Mortimer, B., ‘‘Portraits of the Postmodern Person in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 49, no. 1/2, 1997. Patterson, Patricia, and Manny Farber, ‘‘The Power and the Gory,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 34, no. 3, May-June 1998. Wilmington, Michael, ‘‘The Wild Heart,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 34, no. 3, May-June 1998. Taubin, Amy, ‘‘God’s Lonely Man,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 9, no. 4, April 1999. *** It was during the 1970s—the period of Vietnam and Watergate— that American society appeared in imminent danger of collapse, the crisis in ideological confidence being (quite logically) complemented by the growth of the major radical movements of contemporary culture: feminism, black militancy, gay activism. The confusions and hysteria of the social climate (the historical moment when the dominant ideology of bourgeois patriarchal capitalism and reinforce- ment under Carter and Reagan) were reflected in the products of Hollywood: one might say that the most interesting and distinguished films of the period were also the most incoherent, centered in the experience of contradiction, disillusionment and desperation. Their failure to develop beyond confusion and contradiction must be attributed to the continuing prohibition (within the American cultural establishment) on imagining any alternative form of cultural organi- zation to patriarchal capitalism. Taxi Driver is an outstanding product of this cultural situation. Its rich and fascinating incoherence has a number of sources. The collaboration of Scorsese and Schrader involved its own immediate problems. Scorsese’s ideological/political position is very difficult to define (perhaps an example of the ability of art to transcend such definitions): he has consistently refused to commit himself to any definable radical position, yet, in their systematic analysis of the untenability of all our social institutions, his films clearly earn the term ‘‘radical.’’ Schrader, on the other hand, seems plainly (and quite unashamedly) neo-Fascist: his films (as writer and director) amount to a systematic repudiation of all minority groups and any possible social alternative, in order to re-assert a quasi-mystical sense of male supremacy, heterosexual superiority, and a total spurious ‘‘transcen- dence’’ (which amounts to little more than one person’s right to slaughter other people, on the basis of some supposed achievement of spiritual transfiguration, with no foundation in material reality). One must see the curious paralysis of the film’s closing sequence— clearly, on some level, ironic, but with the irony quite unfocused—as the result of this collaboration of partial incompatibles, a view confirmed by Scorsese’s King of Comedy (made without Schrader), with its closely parallel but precisely focused ending. A more profitable tension arises from the film’s fascinating fusion of genres: film noir, the western, the horror film. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)—who has swiftly become established as a signifi- cant figure in American cultural mythology—is on one level the western hero transplanted into the modern urban wilderness: he derives particularly from Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) of The Searchers, and Scorsese and Schrader have made it clear that Ford’s film was a conscious influence. But he is also the psychopath/monster of the contemporary horror film: it is perhaps the chief distinction of Taxi Driver to suggest the relationship between these two apparent opposed archetypes and its significance in relation to American ideology. In fact, the film’s interest is inseparable from its sense of confusion, its failure to define a coherent attitude towards its protago- nist. That confusion must be seen, not merely as the result of a clash of artistic personalities, but as the reflection of a national ideological dilemma. —Robin Wood TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD See OKTIABR TENI ZABYTYKH PREDKOV (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) USSR, 1964 Director: Sergei Paradzhanov Production: Dovzhenko Studios (Kiev); Magicolor, 35mm; running time: variously noted as 100 minutes, 98 minutes and 95 minutes. Released 1964, USSR. Filmed on location among the Gutsuls in the Carpathians. Screenplay: Sergei Paradzhanov and Ivan Chendei, inspired by the novelette Wild Horses of Fire by M. Kotsiubinsky, and by west- ern Ukrainian folklore; photography: Yuri Ilyenko; editor: M. Ponomarenko; sound: S. Sergienko; art directors: M. Rakovsky and G. Yakutovich; music: M. Skorik. TENI ZABYTYKH PREDKOV FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1186 Cast: Ivan Nikolaichuk (Ivan); Larissa Kadochnikova (Marichka); Tatiana Bestaeva (Palagna); Spartak Bagashvili (Yurko the Sor- cerer); several Gutsul natives. Publications Books: Gaby, H., and others, Serge Paradjanov, Lausanne, 1977. Liehm, Mira, and Antonin Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Cazals, Patrick, Serguei Paradjanov, Paris, 1993. Korohods’skyi, R.M., Serhii Paradzhanov: zlet, trahediia, vichnist’, Ky?v, 1994. Articles: Seeyle, John, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1966. Filmfacts (New York), no. 10, 1967. International Film Guide (London), 1967. Paradjanov, S., in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1968. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), June 1969. Nemes, K., in Filmkultura (Budapest), September-October 1974. Delmas, J., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Marshall, Herbert, ‘‘The Case of Sergei Paradjanov,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 1, 1975. Liehm, Antonin, ‘‘A Certain Cowardice,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1975. Delmas, J., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Treilhou, M. C., in Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1975. Potrel-Dorget, M. L., in Image et Son (Paris), May 1978. Cook, D. A., ‘‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Film as Religious Art,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Spring-Summer 1984. Barsky, V., ‘‘Uber Sergej Paradschanow und seine Filme: Im Schatten von vergessenen Ahnen,’’ in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), October- November 1985. Kroll, Jack, ‘‘The Pas De Perestroika: A New Generation of Soviet Artists Try to Undo the Damage of Half Century of Stalinist Repression and Socialist Realism,’’ in Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 24, 14 December 1987. Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 11, 1989. Payne, R., ‘‘The Storm of the Eye: Culture, Spectacle, Paradzhanov,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 10, no. 1, 1989. Cook, D.A., ‘‘Making Sense,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 17, no. 2–3, Winter-Spring 1993. Nebesio, Bohdan Y., ‘‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Storytelling in the Novel and the Film,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 22, no. 1, January 1994. Holden, Stephen, in The New York Times, vol. 145, C8, 10 Novem- ber 1995. *** Sergei Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors first ap- peared in the West in 1965; it won 16 foreign festival awards and was released in the United States and Europe to critical acclaim. Not since the triumph of Potemkin, in fact, had a Soviet motion picture enjoyed such international esteem. At home, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was variously accused of ‘‘formalism’’ and ‘‘Ukrainian national- ism,’’ and it was deliberately underbooked in domestic theaters by Sovkino officials. Paradzhanov found himself personally attacked by the Party Secretary for Ideological Problems, and he was consistently denied permission to travel abroad. During the next ten years, Paradzhanov went on to write ten complete scenarios based on classical Russian literature and folk epics, all of which were refused by Soviet authorities, and to make one more film—Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates)—which was banned on its release in 1969 and finally given limited distribution in a version ‘‘re-edited’’ by Sergei Yutkevitch in the early 1970s. In January 1974, Paradzhanov was arrested and charged with a variety of offences, including homosexual rape, the spreading of venereal disease, and the illegal sale of icons. Although only the charges of trafficking in art objects stuck, Paradzhanov was sentenced to six years hard labor in Gulag. An international petition campaign forced the Soviets to release him in late 1977, but he has not been allowed to work in the film industry since then. Recently, Paradzhanov told a friend: ‘‘I am already a dead man. I can no longer live without creating. In prison my life had direction; there was a reality to surmount. My present life is worse than death.’’ The question poses itself: What was Shadows of Forgot- ten Ancestors to have provoked such admiration, controversy and, finally, misery for its maker? How coul the unique sensibility mirrored in this richly poetic film have been perceived by the Soviet bureaucracy as a political threat at all? Adapted by Paradzhanov and Ivan Chendei from a pre-Revolu- tionary novelette by the distinguished Ukrainian writer M. Kotsiubinsky to celebrate the centennial of his birth, Shadows of Forgotten Ances- tors retells an ancient Carpathian folk legend of universal resonance. Deep in the Carpathian mountains, at the farthest western reach of the Ukraine, live the Gutsuls, a proud peasant race cut off from the rest of the world by natural boundaries. They are impulsive, fierce, and— though nominally Christian—deeply superstitious and tied to pagan ways. The story begins in the childhood of the two future lovers, when the boy Ivan’s father is killed in a fit of anger by the girl Marichka’s father, initiating a blood-feud between the two families. But even as children Ivan and Marichka are drawn to each other by strong spiritual attraction. Later, when they are youths, the attraction becomes physical as well, and Ivan impregnates Marichka shortly before he must leave to work as a bondsman for a group of shepherds on the opposite mountain. (Ivan is the sole support of his aged and impover- ished mother; Marichka’s family is relatively wealthy—the source of the original dispute between the fathers.) As they part, the two lovers agree that every night before Ivan returns they will gaze at the north star to commemorate their love. One night Marichka is drawn out by the star, through the woods, to a bluff above the river. There, attempting to rescue a lost lamb (which is symbolically linked to her love for Ivan), she plunges into the river and drowns. Instinctively realizing that something is wrong, Ivan rushes to the river gorge and floats downstream on a logging barge to discover her body washed up on the shore. After Marichka’s death, Ivan goes through a long period of numbing grief and desolate wandering. Finally, however, he is able to experience love for another woman, Palagna, who eventually be- comes his wife. But their marriage proves joyless and barren, for Ivan finds Palagna’s carnality degrading compared to the purity of his lost love. More and more, he can think only of the dead Marichka, and finally he begins to look toward death himself. Palagna, scorned, contracts an affair with the local sorcerer who promises to make her fertile with his magic. One night, the sorcerer goads Ivan into a fight TENI ZABYTYKH PREDKOVFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1187 in the local tavern and cleaves his skull with an ax (the same mode of death as Ivan’s father). Ivan stumbles deliriously through the woods to the river where Marichka drowned, and in a vision she appears to him. They embrace and Ivan dies. Then, like his father before him, his corpse is laid out, and the men, women, and children of the village observe their ancient ritual of death. At the level of plot, then, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors offers a relatively familiar tale of undying love which has variants in cultures all over the world. But in the telling of that tale, Paradzhanov has created a vision of human experience so radical and unique as to subvert all authority. To say that Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors violates every narrative code and representational system known to the cinema is an understatement—at times, in fact, the film seems intent upon deconstructing the very process of representation itself. The relationship between narrative logic and cinematic space— between point of view inside and outside the frame—is so consis- tently undermined that most critics on first viewing literally cannot describe what they’ve seen. Adjectives frequently used to character- ize Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors are ‘‘hallucinatory,’’ ‘‘intoxicat- ing,’’ and ‘‘delirious’’—terms that imply, however positively, confu- sion and incoherence. But the camera and editing techniques which elicit such comments are all part of Paradzhanov’s deliberate aes- thetic strategy to interrogate a whole set of historically evolved assumptions about the nature of cinematic space and the relationship which exists between the spectator and the screen. Paradzhanov proceeds by means of perceptual dislocation, so that it becomes impossible at any given moment to imagine a stable time- space continuum for the dramatic action. Often, for example, the viewer will be invited by conventional stylistic means to share a point of view which is suddenly ruptured by camera movement or some other disjunction in spatial logic; spaces which appear to be contigu- ous in one shot sequence are revealed to be miles apart in the next; at other times, the camera assumes perspectives and executes manoeuvres which appear to be physically, as well as dramatically, impossible: the camera looks down from the top of a falling tree perhaps 100 feet tall; it looks up through a pool, with no optical distortion, as Ivan drinks from its surface; it whirls 360 degrees on its axis for nearly a full minute, dissolving focus and colour to abstraction; it turns corners and swoops down embankments with inhuman celerity. Finally, Paradzhanov and his cinematographer, Yuri Ilyenko, use a variety of lenses, including telephoto zoom and 180-degree wide-angle, or ‘‘fish-eye,’’ to wrap the film’s scenographic space to the outer limits of narrative comprehension. The point of these techniques is not to confuse the spectator but to prevent him from constructing in his head the kind of comfortable, familiar, and logically continuous represen- tational space associated with traditional narrative form. The reason is simply that the film posits a world which is neither comfortable, familiar, nor logically continuous, for Shadows of Forgotten Ances- tors exists most fully not in the realm of narrative but of myth and the unconscious. It is above all else a deeply psychological film, rich in both Freudian and Jungian imagery. Ivan’s yearning after the dead Marichka is imaged in many ways as a positive desire to merge with the anima and become psychologically whole. But it is also imaged darkly as a plunging descent into a Hades-like chasm containing the river where Marichka drowned, as a terrible, desperate craving to return to womb of the mother with whom Ivan has lived in a figurally Oedipal relationship since his father’s death as a child—that mother who disappears from the film inexplicably and without comment at the very moment that Marichka drowns. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’s psychological subtlety extends to its use of sound and color. It has been frequently noted that the film has an operatic, pageant-like quality; and Paradzhanov uses a com- plex variety of music—from atonal electronics, to lush orchestral romanticism, to hieratic religious chants, to vocal and instrumental folk music—to create leitmotifs for the various psychological ele- ments in his film. For example, the dark side of the Ivan-Marichka union is first announced at their moment of sexual awakening as children (after they have just bathed in the river where Marichka will drown) by a disturbingly atonal violin piece which rises to a cre- scendo as the intensity of their longing mounts. This theme re-appears on the soundtrack whenever Paradzhanov wishes to summon forth the psychologically disruptive linkage between sex and death which underlies their relationship (as it underlied the human psyche). Similarly, the bright, innocent, psychologically integral side of their love is celebrated by a joyful folk song, sung both by and about them, not only while Marichka lives, but also, for example, at that moment later in the film when Ivan casts down his grief and becomes for a while at least, reconciled to her death. For the most part, however, Paradzhanov’s use of sound is as anti-traditional as his use of the cinematography and editing. Characteristically, Ivan’s grief-stricken wanderings after Marichka’s death are accompanied not by music but by the off-screen gossip of neighbors commenting on his decline. And Paradzhanov manipulates his sound track in other ways, creating certain effects for symbolic purposes (such as the sound of the ‘‘invisible ax’’ hacking away off-screen which appears at fateful cruxes in Ivan’s life). Paradzhanov spoke of having created for Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors a ‘‘dramaturgy of color,’’ and this element of film compo- sition too is used in a psychologically provocative way. When Ivan and Marichka are first drawn together by their fathers’’ violence, the prevailing color of the film is the white of the snow, corresponding to their innocence (although its opposite is prefigured by the blood of Ivan’s father running down the lens at the moment of his death); the green of spring dominates their young love; monochrome and sepia tones are used to drain the world of color during the period of Ivan’s grieving; but color returns riotously, if briefly, after he meets Palagna; as that relationship turns barren, the film is dominated by autumnal hues; monochrome returns during Ivan’s death delirium; and at the moment of his death the natural universe is painted in surreal shades of red and blue. Less noticed are the nearly subliminal fades to white and red which connect all the major sequences and the use of fades generally to isolate symbolic detail or create symbolic association. The effect of both the soundtrack and the color system, like that of the film’s optical distortions and dislocations, is to destabilize the spectator perceptually, and therefore psychologically, in order to present a tale that operates not at the level of narrative but of myth: youth passes from innocence to experience to solitude and death in a recurring cycle, eons upon eons. This is the ‘‘shadow’’ of ‘‘forgot- ten ancestors,’’ the archetypal pattern that outlasts and transcends all individual identity. Now the disconcerting violations of point of view through dizzying camera movement and impossible camera angles acquire new significance. For to annihilate individual point of view is to suggest a collective one, and the ‘‘impossible’’ perspectives of the film are only so to humans. From the beginning of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors through its final frames, Paradzhanov has forced the viewer to ask himself at every turn a single question: Through whose eyes do I see? From the top of a tree, from the bottom of a pond, from the center of a violent 360-degree rotation—through whose eyes? There can only be one answer: We see this film through the eyes LA TERRA TREMA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1188 of something that is greater and older than all of humankind, that is everywhere at once, that discerns what things are and simultaneously what they are not. Paradzhanov may have dabbled in political dissent and been too outspoken in his criticism of officialdom, but the Soviet bureaucrats silenced him because Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is an extraordinary testament to the powers of film as religious art, and its maker was a poet of God. —David Cook LA TERRA TREMA Italy, 1947 Director: Luchino Visconti Production: Universalia; black and white, 35mm; running time: about 160 minutes. Released 1947. Filmed 1947 in Aci Trezza, a small fishing village in Sicily. Producer: Salvo d’Angelo; screenplay: Luchino Visconti, from the 19th century novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga; assistant directors: Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli; photography: G. R. Aldo; editor: Mario Serandrei; sound: Vittorio Trentino; music: Willi Ferrero with Luchino Visconti. La Terra Trema Cast: The cast is composed of the people of Aci Trezza in Sicily. Publications Script: Visconti, Luchino, La terra trema, in Two Screenplays, New York, 1970; as La terra trema, Bologna, 1977. Books: Gromo, Mario, Cinema Italiano, Milan, 1954. Pellezzari, Lorenzo, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1960. Baldelli, Pio, I film di Luchino Visconti, Manduria, 1965. Guillaume, Yves, Visconti, Paris, 1966. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti, New York, 1968; 2nd edition, 1973. Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema, New York, 1972. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism, New York, 1972. Ferrera, Adelio, editor, Visconti: Il cinema, Milan, 1977. Tornabuoni, Lietta, editor, Album Visconti, Milan, 1978. Stirling, Monica, A Screen of Time, New York, 1979. Visconti, Luchino, Il meo teatro (2 volumes), Bologna, 1979. Rondolini, Gianni, Luchino Visconti, Turin, 1981. Servadio, Gaia, Luchino Visconti: A Biography, London, 1981. Bencivenni, Alessandro, Luchino Visconti, Florence, 1982. Tonetti, Claretta, Luchino Visconti, Boston, 1983. Ishaghpour, Youssef, Luchino Visconti: Le Sens et l’image, Paris, 1984. Sanzio, Alain, and Paul-Louis Thirard, Luchino Visconti: Cinéaste, Paris, 1984. De Guisti, Luciano, I film di Luchino Visconti, Rome, 1985. Mancini, Elaine, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Villien, Bruno, Visconti, Paris, 1986. Schifano, Laurence, Luchino Visconti: Les Feux de la passion, Paris, 1987. Micciché, Lino, Visconti e il neorealismo: Ossessione, La terra trema, Bellissima, Venice, 1990. Renzi, Renzo, Visconti segreto, Rome, 1994. Micciché, Lino, Luchino Visconti: un profilo critico, Venice, 1996. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, Cam- bridge, 1998. Articles: Renzi, Renzo, ‘‘Mitologia e contemplasione in Visconti, Ford, e Eisenstein,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), February 1949. Bianco e Nero (Rome), March 1951. Ecran Fran?ais (Paris), January 1952. Speri, Pietro, ‘‘Verismo litterario e neorealismo,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 15 March 1954. Castello, G. C., ‘‘Luchino Visconti,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 14 October 1956. Dyer, Peter, ‘‘The Vision of Visconti,’’ in Film (London), March- April 1957. Domarchi, Jean, and Doniol Valcroze, interview with Visconti, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer-Autumn 1959. LA TERRA TREMAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1189 Poggin, G., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1960. Rhode, Eric, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘The Earth Still Trembles,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1961. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Premier Plan (Paris), May 1961. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Etudes Cinématographique (Paris), nos. 26–27, 1963. Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1963. Elsaesser, Thomas, in Brighton Film Review, February 1970. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Cinema (Rome), April 1970. Bazin, André, in What is Cinema? 2, edited by Hugh Gray, Berke- ley, 1971. Korte, Walter, in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1971. New York Times, 7 January 1979. Rosi, Francesco, ‘‘En travaillant avec Visconti: Sur le tournage de La terra trema,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1979. Lyons, D., ‘‘Visconti’s Magnificent Obsessions,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1979. Prudente, R., ‘‘I proverbi di Verga nelle variazioni di Visconti,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), October 1980. ‘‘Le Néo-Réalisme Issue’’ of Cahiers Lumières (Besan?on), Novem- ber 1980. Decaux, Emmanuel, in Cinématographe (Paris), May 1981. Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘La vera storia di Visconti a Venezia,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), vol. 43, no. 347, January-February 1994. Rosi, Francesco, ‘‘Entre Le kid et La terre tremble,” in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Nagel, Josef, ‘‘Der Rhytmus der Pferde,’’ in Film-Dienst (Cologne), vol. 49, no. 7, 26 March 1996. Lopate, Phillip, ‘‘A Master Who Confounded the Categorizers: Luchino Visconti Was an Aristocrat Whose Politics Were Pro- gressive, a Neo-Realist Who Delighted in Melodrama and Deca- dence,’’ in The New York Times, 16 November 1997. *** 1948, the year of La terra trema, is also the year of the crucial postwar Italian elections. As neo-realism often has it, political history and film history coincide. Italians went to the polls for the vote that was to determine the course of Italian political life for many decades: the election of a Christian Democrat legislative majority. La terra trema owes its genesis in part to that coincidence. In 1947 the director Luchino Visconti went to Sicily with two young and promising assistant directors—Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli—and two reported intentions: to record in a short documen- tary the historic moment of political and social renewal that was expected to result from the collective action of the workers and peasants and to realize the old ambition of adapting Verga (here specifically I Malavoglia) to the screen. Visconti stayed for seven months. During that time the original projects underwent radical transformation: the film that finally resulted reflects an amalgam of the stylistic and ideological directions of the two. Confronted by the structures and spirit of Aci Trezza (the village on the eastern coast of Sicily that had served as setting for Verga’s novel), Visconti fash- ioned a film honest to the reality he found rather than to the dictates of current political theory interpreted by Northern political logic. The conditions for revolution were not present; the Sicilian proletariat was in no sense prepared to rise against exploitation and oppression. Whatever few attempts there might be were doomed to failure. Nor could a version faithful to Verga bear witness to the struggle of contemporary fishermen. A powerful, essentially hostile universe, against which man is locked in the eternal drama of hopeless battle, would no longer satisfy the exigencies of the new verismo. The enemy needed to be identified unmistakably as capitalism—its closed sys- tem, its greed. The developing narrative intention demanded a form consonant with its ambition. The epic portrait of the fishermen of the Sicilian village would, it was projected, be followed by two other films of equal scope to complete a trilogy on the ‘‘southern question’’—the first on the struggles of Sicilian mine workers, the second on that of peasants. But finances determined that only ‘‘the episode of the sea,’’ the story of the Valastros, be told. Young ‘Ntoni, enraged by the crooked dealings of the fish wholesalers, exhilarated by a first expression of revolt, in love and eager to marry, realizes that as long as he, his grandfather and brothers fish from a boat that belongs to others, they will remain in the relative poverty they have always known, cheated of the just rewards of their labor. Counter to the ways of generations of his family and neighbors, ‘Ntoni mortgages the family home in order to buy a boat. After an initial moment of promise, the family fortunes begin to decline. The boat is lost in a storm, and then, because of the hostility of the wholesalers and boat owners, the family falls into debt and then abject poverty. The bank appropriates the house, the grandfather dies, one brother flees with a shadowy stranger, a sister is disgraced, another loses her chance of happiness. In the end, ‘Ntoni and his younger brothers return to the sea as hired hands on another’s boat. ‘Ntoni realizes that individual action can only lead to failure, that in collective action alone is there any hope for success. Like the story, the actors of La terra trema were found in the place of the action. The Valastros, their friends and neighbors, are played by fishermen, bricklayers, wives and daughters of Aci Trezza. The language they speak is the dialect of their village, hardly more comprehensible to the speaker of standard Italian than to any other foreigner. A narrator advances the plot through voiceover comments, and above all through translations from the dialect of Aci Trezza into the national tongue of that part of Italy the Sicilian calls ‘‘the continent.’’ In the approximately 160 minutes of La terra trema, the camera remains confined to Aci Trezza, to the horizon accessible to it from the fixed position of the church square. The world of the camera is enclosed towards the sea by the two rocks that form a gate for the harbor, and towards land by the fields beyond the cluster of houses that constitute the village. This is the world of the inhabitants of Aci Trezza. Beyond it lie danger and death. Within the space, Aldo, Visconti’s cinematographer (for whom La terra trema represented a remarkable first experience with moving pictures), integrated characters, decor and landscape into a startling cogent whole. Through a mise-en-scène which, as Bazin points out, for the first time demonstrated the possibilities of depth of field to exterior as well as interior locations, Aldo achieved that which Visconti had perceived as necessary to an understanding of the Valastros: their integrity with the village and the sea, their dependency on both. —Mirella Jona Affron THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1190 DAS TESTAMENT DES DOKTOR MABUSE See DOKTOR MABUSE, DER SPIELER THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE USA, 1974 Director: Tobe Hooper Production: Vortex. A Henkel-Hooper production; CFI Color; run- ning time: 87 minutes (British version is 81 minutes); length: 7,290 feet. Released November 1974. Executive producer: Jay Parsley; producer: Tobe Hooper; screen- play: Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper, from their own story; photogra- phy: Daniel Pearl; additional photography: Tobe Hooper; editors: Sallye Richardson, Larry Carroll; sound recordists: Ted Nicolau, Buzz Knudson, Jay Harding; sound re-recordist: Paul Harrison; art director: Robert A. Burns; make-up: Dorothy Pearl and Dr. W. E. Barnes; music: Tobe Hooper, Wayne Bell; narrator: John Larroquette. Cast: Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty); Allen Danziger (Jerry); Paul A. Partain (Franklin Hardesty); William Vail (Kirk); Teri McMinn (Pam); Edwin Neal (Hitch-hiker); Jim Siedow (Old Man); Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface); John Dugan (Grandfather); Perry Lorenz (Pickup Driver); Joe Bill Hogan (Drunk); Robert Courten (Window Washer); William Creamer (Bearded Man); John Henry Faulk (Story- teller); Jerry Green (Cowboy); Ed Guinn (Cattle Truck Driver). Publications Books: McCarty, John, Splatter Movies, New York, 1984. Newman, Kim, Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Movie from 1968, London, 1988. Articles: Variety (New York), 6 November 1974. Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), vol. 5, no. 2, 1976. Phelps, Guy, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1976. Pym, John, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1976. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), January 1977. Greenspun, Roger, ‘‘Carrie and Sally and Leatherface Among the Film Buffs,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-Febru- ary 1977. Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1977. Williams, Tony, in Movie (London), Winter 1977–78. Alion, Y., ‘‘Massacre a la tronconneuse,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), June 1982. Philbert, B., ‘‘Le Syndrome Black et Decker,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), July-August 1982. ‘‘Tobe Hooper,’’ in Film Dope (London), November 1982. Bedoya, R., ‘‘Otros dos nombres de cine fantastico: Romero y Hooper,’’ in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), March 1984. Carson, Kit, ‘‘‘Saw’ Thru: Choice Cuts,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1986. Clover, C.J., ‘‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,’’ in Representations, vol. 20, Fall 1987. O’Brien, Geoffrey, in The New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 8, 22 April 1993. Olszewski, Mike, ‘‘Those Little Ol’ Cannibals From Texas,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 52, September-October 1995. Brottman, M., ‘‘Stories of Childhood and Chainsaws,’’ in Cinefantastique (Forest Park), vol. 27, no. 6, 1996. Svehla, S., in Midnight Marquee (Baltimore), no. 53, Spring 1997. Williams, D.E., ‘‘Bringing Back Texas Chainsaw’s Buzz,’’ in Ameri- can Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 78, April 1997. Charles, John, in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 38, 1997. *** The sensationalist brilliance of Tobe Hooper’s independently made, regional horror masterwork begins with its eye-grabbing, unforgettable title. It takes guts to be so blatant up-front. More guts, in fact, than are spilled in the movie. Nothing could possibly be as bloody and atrocious as the title and the poster (‘‘who will survive, and what will be left of them?’’) suggest The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is going to be. Hooper goes completely the other way: there are no close-ups of open wounds (the gore film trademark), and all the limb-lopping happens out of shot. This restraint could as easily be due to dissatisfaction with the obvious fakery of low budget gore as to innate good taste and humanity. Restraint is exhibited in no other aspect of Hooper’s direction. Instead of the single mummy of Psycho, which was based on the same real-life murder case, there is a whole houseful of human and animal remains. Rather than Hitchcock’s delicate, suspenseful manipulation, Hooper follows the lead of fellow independent George A. Romero and feeds the audience through a mangle of unrelieved horror and violence. Deep in the heart of Texas—a country of dead armadilloes, violated corpses and disused slaughterhouses—a group of vapid teenagers unwisely enter an old, dark house. The apparent leading man wanders down a filthy corridor towards a red room walled with animal trophies. Suddenly, without any Hitchcockian overhead shot to pre-empt the shattering shock, Leatherface, a squealing, obese killer, appears from nowhere and smashes his head with a sledgehammer. Before the audience has had time really to register what has happened, Leatherface slams an unexpected, grating steel shutter across the corridor and finishes off the still-twitching boy out of sight. After the film has been blooded by its first kill, Leatherface rapidly slaughters three more of the teenagers, using a meathook, the sledge, and a buzzing chainsaw. Fleeing from Leatherface, Sally, the heroine by virtue of her survival, is repeatedly caught in brambles and bushes that the killer easily saws his way through. This physically exhausting chase sequence tops the opening of Night of the Living THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACREFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1191 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Dead as a filming of the universal nightmare. The girl winds up at the mercy of the Leatherface clan, a family whose proud boast is that they have ‘‘always been in meat.’’ Following Romero, Larry Cohen and Wes Craven and pace Robin Wood’s critical writings on the genre, Hooper sees the American family as the true locus of the horror film. His degenerates are a parody of the typical sit com family, with the bread-winning, long- suffering Gas Man as Pop, the preening, bewigged, apron-wearing Leatherface as Mom, and the rebellious, long-haired Hitch as the teenage son. Their house is a similarly overdone, degraded mirror of the ideal home. Impaled clocks hang from the eaves, an armchair has human arms, and a hen is cooped up in a canary cage. With an unlikely burst of superhuman strength that drags the film momentarily back into the sloppy contrivances of a typical ‘‘B’’ picture, Sally breaks free and crashes through a window. On the main road, Hitch is messily run over and Sally clambers into the back of a speeding pickup truck. She survives, but as a blood-covered, shrieking, prob- ably insane grotesque. The film fades on a long shot of the enraged Leatherface whirling his chainsaw in the air. Chainsaw is only defensible as a nightmare. It bristles with socio- psychological sub-texts, but is so visceral there is barely time for an audience to breathe, let alone ponder what it’s all about. We sympathise with the victims not because they are particularly pleasant but because the only other choice Hooper gives us is walking out. The killers are unknowable, barely characterised monsters who resist the in- sight Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins make us have into Norman Bates. Hooper’s achievement is that he brings back to the mov- ies an awareness of violent death lost through the slow motion sentimentalisation of Bonnie and Clyde and the contemptible distor- tion of TV cop shows. Unlike the notorious and comparable I Spit On Your Grave, Chainsaw is not a complete turn-off. If Hooper and his collaborators do not make their subject palatable, at least they succeed in justifying the film with its own panache. With its surprising amount of intentional comedy, the film is an important precursor of the horror comic style of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. The film is also remarkable for its technical proficiency, espe- cially by comparison with such inept precedents as Herschell Gordon Lewis’s ‘‘gore’’ movies, with particularly outstanding sound editing, art direction and editing, and a clutch of effective, if necessarily one- note, performances. Sadly, despite the promise demonstrated in this, his first mainstream film, Hooper’s subsequent career has not been THELMA AND LOUISE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1192 distinguished: his work on Poltergeist was eclipsed by the input of co-executive-producer/screenwriter Steven Spielberg, his big-budget science fiction efforts Lifeforce and Invaders From Mars proved disastrous and his attempts to recreate the mood of Chainsaw in Death Trap, The Funhouse and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part 2 have been variably unfortunate. —Kim Newman THELMA AND LOUISE USA, 1991 Director: Ridley Scott Production: Pathe Entertainment; color, 35mm; running time: 123 minutes. Producer: Mimi Polk; executive producers: Dean O’Brien and Callie Khouri; screenplay: Callie Khouri; photography: Adrian Biddle; editor: Thom Noble; production designer: Norris Spencer; music: Hans Zimmer; costume design: Elizabeth McBride. Cast: Susan Sarandon (Louise); Geena Davis (Thelma); Harvey Keitel (Hal); Michael Madsen (Darryl); Brad Pitt (hitchhiker). Awards: Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, 1992 Publications Books: Griggers, Cathy, ‘‘Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New Butch-Femme,’’ Film Theory Goes to the Movies, edited by Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, Ava Preacher Collins, New York, 1993. Horton, Andrew, ‘‘Thelma and Louise,’’ Writing the Character Centered Screenplay, Berkeley, 1994. Sammon, Paul, Ridley Scott: Close Up, New York, 1999. Articles: ‘‘Should We Go Along for the Ride?’’ in ‘‘A Critical Symposium on Thelma and Louise,’’ in Cineaste, Vol. XVIII, No. 4 (1991): responses from Pat Dowell, Elayne Rapping, Alice Cross, Sarah Schulman & Roy Grundmann. Royal, Susan, ‘‘An Interview with Geena Davis,’’ in American Premiere, May/June 1991. Denby, David, ‘‘Road Warriors,’’ in New York, 10 June 1991. Carlson, Margaret, ‘‘Is This What Feminism is All About?’’ in Time, 24 June 1991. Schickel, Richard, ‘‘Gender Bender,’’ in Time, 24 June 1991. Dargis, Manshia, ‘‘Roads to Freedom,’’ in Sight & Sound, 1 July 1991. Kauffman, Stanley, ‘‘Two for the Road’’ in New Republic, 1 July 1991. Amory, Mark, ‘‘Two Birds in the Bush,’’ in Spectator, 13 July 1991. Krupp, Charles, ‘‘Why Thelma and Louise Scares the Devil Out of Some Men and Women,’’ in Glamour, August 1991. Bruning, Fred, ‘‘A Lousy Deal for Woman and Man,’’ in Mclean’s, 12 August 1991. Granier, Richard, ‘‘Killer Bimbos,’’ in Commentary, September 1991. Baber, Asa, ‘‘Guerrilla Feminism,’’ in Playboy, October 1991. Mais, Kathi, ‘‘Women Who Murder Men,’’ in Ms, November 1991. Sharrett, Christopher, ‘‘Phony Feminism Fails on the Silver Screen,’’ in USA TODAY, November 1991. Greenburg, Harvey, ‘‘The Many Faces of Thelma and Louise,’’ in Film Quarterly, Winter 1991. Taylor, John, ‘‘Men on Trial,’’ in New York, 16 December 1991. Knode, Helen, ‘‘Against All Odds,’’ in Movieline, June 1992. Nadeau, Chantal, ‘‘Are You Talking to Me?: Les enjeux du women’s cinema pour un regard féministe,’’ in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 2, no. 2–3, Spring 1992. Tasker, Yvonne, ‘‘Criminelles: Thelma et Louise et autres délinquantes,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau), no. 67, March 1993. Feaster, Felicia, ‘‘Montage,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), no. 38, June 1993. Man, G., ‘‘Gender, Genre, and Myth in Thelma and Louise,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 18, no. 1, Fall 1993. Chumo, Peter N., II: ‘‘At the Generic Crossroads with Thelma and Louise,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 13, no. 2, Winter- Spring 1994. Briggs, J.B., ‘‘Mantrack,’’ in Playboy, vol. 41, February 1994. Boozer, Jack, ‘‘Seduction and Betrayal in the Heartland: Thelma and Louise,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 23, no. 3, July 1995. Katz, S.B., ‘‘A Conversation with Callie Khouri,’’ in The Journal: Writer’s Guild of America, West (Los Angeles), vol. 8, Septem- ber 1995. Bundtzen, L.K., ‘‘Thelma and Louise: A Story Not to Be Believed,’’ in The Communication Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995. Laderman, D., ‘‘What a Trip: The Road Film and American Culture,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996. Premiere (Boulder), vol. 11, October 1997. Willman, Chris, ‘‘Ridley’s Believe It or Not,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, no. 409, 12 December 1997. *** ‘‘Two women go on a crime spree’’ was, as first time screenwriter Callie Khouri has explained, the original inspiration behind the script that became a film and then something of a legend around the world, Thelma and Louise. Khouri walked off with an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for her efforts, but more importantly, the film became a ‘‘must see’’ and ‘‘must discuss’’ event that thrilled, angered, empowered, and fright- ened various audiences. The long list of articles listed above is testimony itself to the interest this female outlaw buddy road film evoked at the time it came out (they even made it to the cover of Time) and since. Why such attention? First, the story is a fascinating reworking of two male dominated genres: the American road film including THELMA AND LOUISEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1193 Thelma and Louise everything from Easy Rider and Badlands to Smokey and the Bandit and Two Lane Blacktop, together with the outlaw buddy Western as especially embodied in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The twist is that this time the buddies are women and instead of horses, we’re dealing with the open highway through the Western landscape (breathtakingly shot by cinematographer Adrian Biddle). Furthermore, Khouri’s script pushes these genres beyond what we had come to expect of these formula films. What appears to be a simple light-hearted Southwestern working class female adventure suddenly turns dark, dangerous, and absolutely engrossing the mo- ment Louise kills Thelma’s would-be rapist in the country bar parking lot. What follows is their flight from the law and their men until they finally take hold of their own lives and make one strong assertive statement: their death as they drive off the rim of the Grand Canyon rather than face surrender and capture by the ‘‘men with guns’’ packed around them, much like the hundreds of Bolivian troops surrounding Butch and Sundance at the end of their tale. The ending, however, points a telling difference with and from Butch Cassidy and other road movies. While it’s never quite clear how aware Butch and Sundance are that they are about to die (and they certainly do not express this thought in their dialogue), Thelma and Louise absolutely agree on ‘‘Let’s not get caught,’’ sealed with soulful and joyful glances at each other. Ironically they embrace each other as friends and life itself, free and pure, before plunging to their chosen death. The film is also memorable for the strong performances by Susan Sarandon as Louise and Geena Davis as Thelma. Rather than busty Hollywood pre-twenty sex kittens, Sarandon and Davis give full bodied character to these thirty and forty-something women who come to enjoy the role-reversing situations they find themselves in. Audiences screamed with delight along with this dynamic duo when, for instance, Thelma blows up the oil tanker truck in the desert. That said, the men in the film also play their less than flattering roles with brio. Newcomer Brad Pitt is sexy and devilishly dangerous as the hitchhiker who gives Thelma her first orgasm and steals all their money. Harvey Keitel plays the exasperated and sympathetic cop well, while Michael Madsen is ‘‘the guy you love to hate’’ as Thelma’s redneck husband, Darryl. Ridley Scott would seem the most unlikely director for the project, since his Blade Runner and Aliens are futuristic and expressionistic high tech nightmares. But Scott, who told Khouri when he met her for the first time, ‘‘We will never change the ending!’’ succeeded in THéRèSE DESQUEYROUX FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1194 reaching into the story and highlighting the mythic dimensions of it. As director he is responsible for the overall exhilaration the film provides of the wide open spaces, the open road, movement and wonder as well as for directing ‘‘non dialogue’’ moments between Thelma and Louise which have an almost improvisational feel to them. As cultural phenomenon, Thelma and Louise touched a number of important cords. As a straightforward film about relationships, it thumbed its nose at ever-escalating budget heavy special effects films in which character seemed unimportant. As a film about women written by a woman and co-produced by a woman (Mimi Polk), this work became a text that many women felt empowered them while threatening many men who felt the film was somehow too ‘‘femi- nist.’’ Khouri denies she is a card-carrying feminist and prefers simply to talk about the characterization of strong women—certainly Thelma and Louise as characters are not portrayed as women con- scious of the women’s movement. As a narrative that ends in death instead of the ‘‘happy ending’’ usually championed by Hollywood, the film forces us all to rethink certain American myths and the ideology underpinning them. —Andrew Horton THéRèSE DESQUEYROUX France, 1962 Director: Georges Franju Production: Filmel; black and white, 35mm; running time: 109 minutes, English version is 107 minutes. Released September 1962, Paris. Filmed at Franstudio, Paris Studio Cinéma, and in Bazas, Villandraut, and Uzeste. Producer: Eugène Lépicier; screenplay: Fran?ois Mauriac, Claude Mauriac, and Georges Franju; dialogue: Fran?ois Mauriac, from his book; photography: Christian Matras; editor: Gilbert Natot; sound: Jean Labussière; art director: Jacques Chalvet; music: Maurice Jarre; costume designer: Lola Prussac. Cast: Emmanuele Riva (Thérèse); Philippe Noiret (Bernard); Edith Scob (Anne de la Trave); Sami Frey (Jean Azévédo); Jeanne Perez (Baslionte); Renée Devillers (Madame Victor de la Trave); Richard Saint-Bris (Hector de la Trave); Lucien Nat (Jér?me Larroque); Hélène Dieudonné (Aunt Clara); Jacques Monod (Duros); Jean- Jacques Rémy (Specialist). Awards: Venice Film Festival, Best Actress (Riva), 1962. Publications Books: Lovell, Alan, Anarchist Cinema, London, 1962; reprinted, New York, 1975. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Personal Style, New York, 1966. Durgnat, Raymond, Franju, Berkeley, 1968. Vialle, Gabriel, Georges Franju, Paris, 1968. Georges Franju: ciclo organizado pela Cinemateca Portuguesa com a alto patrocíno da Embaixada de Fran?a, em Lisboa, Lis- bon, 1982. Articles: Beylie, Claude, ‘‘Les Paradoxes de la fidelité,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1963. Fieschi, Jean-Louis, and Andre Labarthe, ‘‘Nouvel entretien avec Georges Franju,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1963. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 28 November 1963. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), March 1965. Price, James, ‘‘Undertones,’’ in London Magazine, April 1965. Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1965. Leahy, James, in Movie (London), Summer 1965. Desch, Bernard, in Film Society Review (New York), February 1966. ‘‘Franju Issue’’ of Image et Son (Paris), March 1966. MacLochlainn, A., in Film Journal (New York), Summer 1971. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Franju,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1971. Barbaro, Nick, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 27 April 1978. Conrad, R., ‘‘Mystery and Melodrama: A Conversation with Georges Franju,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1981–82. Conrad, Randall, ‘‘Mystery and Melodrama: A Conversation with Georges Franju,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 35, 10 March 1982. Brown, R., ‘‘Georges Franju: Behind Closed Windows,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1983. ‘‘Franju Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), April 1984. *** The fiercely anarchic and irreligious Georges Franju might seem an improbable choice to film a novel of sin and expiation by France’s leading Catholic novelist—unless in a spirit of mocking parody. Yet Thérèse Desqueyroux succeeds in being both an exceptionally faith- ful version of Fran?ois Mauriac’s novel and at the same time fully consistent with Franju’s own attitudes and beliefs. Mauriac himself (who co-scripted together with Franju and Mauriac’s son Claude, film critic of Le Figaro littéraire) was delighted with the final film. With good reason: Thérèse Desqueyroux can be well considered one of the most successful fusions of cinema and literature ever produced. Aided by Christian Matras’s sombrely beautiful monochrome photography, Franju superbly captures the stifling claustrophobia that permeates the novel. Even before she is literally imprisoned by her relatives, Thérèse is trapped: by the narrow confines of her class and provincial society, by the oppressive monotony of the pine forests of the Landes, and by her own inability to communicate the confused, passionate emotions that torment her. Her only release lies in destruc- tion. She disrupts the relationship between her sister-in-law Anne and a young Jewish intellectual, spurred by the ambiguous jealousy which she feels for each of them. And she tries to poison Bernard, her husband (a masterly portrayal of bovine complacency from Philippe Noiret), simply in order ‘‘to see in his eyes a momentary flicker of uncertainty.’’ Events are presented entirely through Thérèse’s eyes; it is her interior monologue we hear on the soundtrack during the complex sequence of flashbacks that occupies the greater part of the film. Yet Franju, despite evident sympathy for his heroine, never palliates her stubborn self-absorption, the source of much of her suffering. As THEY LIVE BY NIGHTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1195 Thérèse, Emmanuele Riva gives a flawless performance as a woman destroyed by her own agonised sensibility, pacing restlessly about her house, snatching at the umpteenth cigarette, or glaring in mute fury at the back of Bernard’s impassive head. Images of fire pervade the film: the conflagrations that threaten Bernard’s beloved pines, the basis of his wealth; the fire that burns constantly, an ironic symbol of cosy domesticity, in the hearth of the Desqueyroux household; Thérèse’s endless succession of cigarettes with which, in her captivity, she leaves burns on her bed-sheets. Where Franju diverges from Mauriac is in the implications he draws from the events of the story—a subtle, but crucial difference. Mauriac’s Thérèse must work out, through imprisonment and suffer- ing, expiation for her sin—which is not so much attempted murder as spiritual pride. For Franju, though, Thérèse is a victim, one of the outsiders whom society cannot accommodate and therefore perse- cutes or destroys—the fate of many of his protagonists, from La tête contre les Murs to La faute de l’Abbé Mouret. Building on Mauriac’s austere parable, Franju constructs his own humane vision: a lucid, grave and compassionate study of isolation, rich in visual metaphor, which vividly conveys the emotional turbulence beneath its cool surface. In Franju’s intense, idiosyncratic, and often uneven output, Thérèse Desqueyroux stands as perhaps his finest, most fully achieved film. —Philip Kemp THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (The Twisted Road) USA, 1948 Director: Nicholas Ray Production: RKO Radio; black and white; running time: 96 minutes; length: 8,597 feet. Released in UK as The Twisted Road, 1948; US Release, 1949. Executive producer: Dore Schary; producer: John Houseman; screenplay: Charles Schnee, from the novel Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson; photography: George E. Diskant; editor: Sher- man Todd; art directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Al Herman; music: Leigh Harline. Cast: Cathy O’Donnell (Keechie); Farley Granger (Bowie); How- ard da Silva (Chicamaw); Jay C. Flippen (T-Dub); Helen Craig (Mattie); Will Wright (Mobley); Ian Wolfe (Hawkins); Harry Harvey (Hagenheimer). Publications Books: McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA, London, 1972. Kreidl, John, Nicholas Ray, Boston, 1977. They Live by Night Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979. Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Films, Bloomington, Indiana, 1981. Masi, Stefano, Nicholas Ray, Florence, 1983. Allen, Blaine, Nicholas Ray: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Hillier, Jim, editor, Cahiers du Cinéma 1: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, London, 1985. Erice, Victor, and Jos Oliver, Nicholas Ray y su tiempo, Madrid, 1986. Giuliani, Pierre, Nicholas Ray, Paris, 1987. Wagner, Jean, Nicholas Ray, Paris, 1987. Grob, Norbert, and Manuela Reichart, Ray, Berlin, 1989. Eisenschitz, Bernard, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, translated by Tom Milne, London, 1993. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1949. Winnington, Richard, in News Chronicle (London), 14 March and 4 June 1949. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 5 June 1949. Graham, Virginia, in Spectator (London), 10 June 1949. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 11 June 1949. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 4 November 1949. Sight and Sound (London), January 1950. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1951. Ray, Nicholas, ‘‘Story into Script,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1956. THEY LIVE BY NIGHT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1196 Bitsch, Charles, ‘‘Entretien avec Nick Ray,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1958. Agel, Henri, ‘‘Nicholas Ray,’’ in New York Film Bulletin, no. 11, 1961. Bastid, Jean-Pierre, ‘‘Nicholas Ray en Amerique,’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), Spring 1961. Houston, Penelope, and John Gillett, ‘‘Conversations with Nicho- las Ray and Joseph Losey,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1961. Pül, Morten, in Vises i Ugen (Copenhagen), nos. 15–19, 1962. Douchet, Jean, and Jacques Joly, ‘‘Entretien avec Nick Ray,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1962. Apra, Adriano, and others, ‘‘Interview with Nicholas Ray,’’ in Movie (London), May 1963. Ray, Nicholas, in Interviews with Film Directors, edited by Andrew Sarris, New York, 1967. Perkins, Victor, ‘‘The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,’’ in Movie Reader, edited by Ian Cameron, New York, 1972. Gomery, Douglas, in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Sum- mer 1972. Wilmington, Michael, ‘‘Nicholas Ray: The Years at RKO (Part One),’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), no. 10, 1973. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Circle of Pain: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1973. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘Rebel Without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fif- ties,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1974. Kolker, Robert P., ‘‘Night to Day,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1974. Cagle, Anthony, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 2 April 1975. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘They Live by Night by Daylight,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1976. Renaud, Tristan, ‘‘Nicholas Ray,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), July-Au- gust 1979. Langlois, G., ‘‘Nicholas Ray (1911–1979),’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 May 1981. Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 6 March 1985. Listener (London), 22 January 1987. Dominicus, Mar, ‘‘Nicholas Ray,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), no. 176, February-March 1991. Kennedy, Harlan, ‘‘The Melodramatists,’’ in American Film, vol. 17, no. 1, January-February 1992. De Bruyn, Olivier, ‘‘Les amants de la nuit: Géométrie d’un regard,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 382, December 1992. Anger, Cédric, ‘‘Un poème de l’espace,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 505, September 1996. *** Jean-Luc Godard once declared that ‘‘the cinema is Nicholas Ray.’’ In a like part-for-whole spirit we might well declare that They Live By Night is Nicholas Ray. Both director and film achieved cult status quickly, yet both remain elusive ‘‘strangers’’ to the critical traditions which do them honor. They Live By Night was produced by John Houseman at RKO in 1947, was held back from distribution when the studio was purchased by Howard Hughes, was twice retitled, was first released in Britain in 1948, and was finally marketed to American audiences in 1949 as a film about ‘‘Hot-rod teenagers living on the razor edge of danger.’’ Perhaps because of its baroque production and marketing history, They Live By Night was included for showing (as Fran?ois Truffaut reports) in the ‘‘Festival du Film Maudit’’ put on by André Bazin and the Objectif 49 ciné-club at Biarritz in the late summer of 1949, effectively granting the film cult status. Likewise, though Ray had just begun his career as a Hollywood director—by contrast with Cahiers du Cinéma favorites like Hawks and Hitchcock—he was already an auteurist cult figure, especially so because Ray and the Cahiers critics (Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette) were 1950s cultural contemporaries. As a result, Ray’s films were less ‘‘re- viewed’’ than ‘‘previewed’’ in the pages of Cahiers; and because Ray was not explicitly ‘‘neglected,’’ he has not yet inspired the full measure of scholarly attention devoted to more obvious ‘‘reclama- tion’’ projects. In that sense he remains a stranger to film criticism. The odd point to make against this ‘‘Ray as auteur cult figure’’ background, then, is that They Live By Night is perhaps Ray’s least neglected, most written-about film. Yet even here a note of ‘‘strange- ness’’ intrudes because the attention paid to Ray’s first feature often has less to do with the Nick Ray cult than with the film noir cult or the Robert Altman cult, the latter occasioned by Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), derived from Edward Anderson’s 1937 novel of the same title which Ray had adapted in making They Live By Night. Moreover, the aura of ‘‘strangeness’’ which lingers about They Live by Night is only heightened on these accounts because both it and Thieves Like Us are typically taken as members of a ‘‘limit case’’ subgenre of film noir. Where ‘‘primary’’ instances of the genre focus on ‘‘haunted or brutal or stupid’’ male characters (gangsters and/or detectives) at hazard in an equally haunted or brutal urban shadow-scape, the ‘‘country thieves’’ sub-genre shifts focus to an ‘‘outlaw couple’’ (Bowie and Keechie in Ray’s film), typically presented more as victims than as denizens of the underworld, who seek to escape their film noir destiny by automotive flight to the countryside. (In They Live By Night ‘‘nature’’ is the Capra-esque auto-camp where the honeymooning Bowie and Keechie hide out to avoid the law, and to avoid Bowie’s bank-robber cohorts, Chicamaw and T-Dub, who need Bowie to pull off another job.) That They Live By Night fits so neatly under the film noir rubric has occasioned some interpretive neglect. John Francis Kreidl’s Nicholas Ray (1977), for example, barely mentions the film. Given the fact that much of Ray’s critical reputation rests on his innovative use of color and of the wide CinemaScope screen, this makes some sense. Yet the consensus is fairly clear that They Live By Night, despite being shot in black and white and in the standard Academy aspect-ratio, remains a strong example of Ray’s elusive yet forceful mise-en-scène, which we might describe, in the light of Robin Wood’s analysis of Ray’s Bigger Than Life, as a unique combination of the ‘‘ethnographic’’ and the ‘‘architectural.’’ The ‘‘ethnographic’’ element of They Live By Night evokes Ray’s typically sympathetic concern for ‘‘sub-cultural’’ groups set within or against a larger (usually American, usually contemporary) society. The ‘‘persecution of the innocents’’ narrative of They Live By Night certainly accords with this description, though so too does Ray’s transcendent, Griffith-inspired close-up treatment of Bowie and Keechie. Yet the romanticism implicit in this graphic valorization of Bowie and Keechie’s innocence is set in thematic place by a narration strategy, both visual and temporal, which asserts a broader, more abstract (in that sense ‘‘architectural’’) perspective on their plight. Ray repeatedly, for example, frames Bowie and Keechie within or against box-like or bar-like architectural enclosures—car windows, O THIASOSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1197 a teller’s cage, the frame of the ‘‘altar’’ at Hawkin’s ‘‘marriage parlor,’’ etc.—all of them suggesting a degree of entrapment to which Ray’s naive characters remain blind. And Ray’s narration also posits a gap between the viewer and his characters by anticipating the film’s outcome; we know in advance that T-Dub’s sister-in-law Mattie, in the hope of freeing her husband from prison, has informed the police that Bowie and Keechie are holed up in the auto-camp she bought with money from the gang’s first holdup. The question of this difference in knowledge or perspective, and the difference it finally makes, is the substance of the only sustained controversy regarding They Live By Night. Film noir readings of They Live By Night typically assume that the victimization visited upon Bowie and Keechie amounts to an indictment of those who victimize them, just as Lang’s depiction of the doomed Eddie and Jo Taylor in You Only Live Once amounts to an indictment of the society whose agents hunt them down, at which point Ray’s perspective is taken to reinforce or validate the lovers’. Peter Biskind, by contrast, while agreeing that Ray shares the vantage point of his characters, denies that their perspective is an effective critique of their (and our) society. Especially by contrast with the Anderson novel, Biskind contends, Ray’s film downplays social criticism by assigning blame exactly to the naivete of the central characters, a naivete resulting in part from their view that the ‘‘normal’’ life of the culture, touchingly epito- mized by the honeymoon utopia of the first auto-camp, is uto- pia enough. If They Live By Night is viewed primarily in economic terms, Biskind’s case is plausible. A number of the film’s secondary characters are sympathetic capitalists sympathetically portrayed (e.g., the Zelton jeweler who sells Bowie the fateful watch). Soon from a more sustainedly feminist perspective, however, They Live By Night can be read as a fairly thorough critique of the alliance between masculine brutality and capitalist alienation, each a cause and a result of the other. The film’s chief figure of this patriarchal symptomology is Keechie’s one-eyed uncle, Chicamaw, who is repeatedly associated with money and spending (the flashy clothes, the hot cars), with unnecessary brutality (the farmer he clubs in the opening sequence), and with incestuous sexual aggression (his come-on to Keechie, his brutal and unwelcomed attentions to Mattie). But two moments are crucial to our understanding of this element of They Live By Night. The first is when T-Dub, hitherto the more avuncular of Bowie’s two elder partners, confirms the brutality of Chicamaw (Keechie’s real uncle). When Bowie tries to beg off the last bank job, T-Dub turns suddenly hostile, tells Bowie he’s ‘‘an investment’’ who’s ‘‘gonna pay off,’’ and then proceeds to slap Bowie about while Chicamaw holds Bowie by the shoulders. The second moment echoes the masculine brutality of the first. Against the background of a pin-up calender with the word ‘‘sales’’ prominent in the shot, a desperate Bowie grabs Mattie roughly by the shoulders, tells her she’s ‘‘a thief’’ like him, and that the ailing Keechie is going to stay at Mattie’s auto- camp whether Mattie likes it or not (‘‘if you or anybody else don’t like it, it’s just too bad’’). The film’s first shot, to the accompaniment of a folk tune (its title and unsung first lines are equally apt and ironic: ‘‘I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me’’), is a romantic two-shot close-up of Bowie and Keechie, described in a series of on-screen titles as a boy and a girl ‘‘never properly introduced to the world we live in.’’ A last title appears: ‘‘To tell their story’’; it is followed by a surge of music. Bowie and Keechie both look suddenly up and off- frame, as if startled by some intrusion into the off-screen space of their world. Cut, then, to the credit sequence of They Live By Night, a powerful and aggressive helicopter shot of the car bearing Bowie, T- Rub, and Chicamaw, over which we see inscribed a variety of ‘‘commercial’’ markers (‘‘RKO Radio Pictures A Dore Shary Pre- sentation’’). To propose the film as an ‘‘introduction’’ implies an epistemic gap, a known and an unknown. And to mark the unknown as a commercial product, to mark its introduction as and by a violent sonic and visual intrusion, is to accept a kind of social responsibility barely hinted at by (if finally consistent with) Bowie’s eventual apology to Mattie. Though a pregnant Keechie does survive the ambush which kills Bowie, to live on in a perpetual night, the couple of Bowie and Keechie does not survive the ‘‘proper’’ knowledge they are threatened by in the film’s first moments. On Biskind’s reading this knowledge is not deadly, or nearly deadly enough. In They Live By Night, Ray shows that it is, and shows why. Whether it will continue to be deadly is ours to determine. —Leland Poague O THIASOS (The Travelling Players) Greece, 1975 Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos Production: Giorgos Papalios; colour, 35mm; running time: 230 minutes. Distribution in the USA: New Yorker Films. Producer: Giorgos Papalios; screenplay: Theodorous Antgelopoulos; photography: Giorgos Arvanitis; editors: Takis Davlopoulos and Giorgos Trantafiliou; production design: Mikes Karapiperis; music: Lukianos Kiliadonis with Fotos Lambrinos, Nena Mejdi, Dimitri Kamberidis, and Kostas Messaris. Cast: Eva Kotamanidou (Electra); Aliki Georgoulis (Mother); Stratos Pachis (Agamemnon); Maris Vassiliou (Clytemnestra); Vangelis Kazan (Aegisthos); Petros Zarkadis (Orestes); Kiriakos Katrivanos (Piladis); Grigoris Evangelatos (Poet). Awards: FIPRESCI Prize, Best Film Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1975; Best Film in ‘‘Forum,’’ Berlin Film Festival, 1975; Salonika Festival, Greek Critics’ Association, Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress, 1975; Italian Critics Association, Best Film in the World for 1970–80, 1979. Publications Script: Angelopoulos, Theodoros, O Thiasos, Themelio, 1975. Books: Arecco, Sergio, Anghelopoulos, La Nuova Italia, Florence, 1978. Estève, Michel, Theo Angelopoulos, Paris, 1985. O THIASOS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1198 O Thiasos Ciment, Michel, and Héléne Tierchant, Theo Angelopoulos, Paris, 1989. Kolovos, Nikos, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Athens, 1990. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, Theo Angelopoulos, Munich, 1992. Horton, Andrew, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contem- plation, Princeton, 1997. Horton, Andrew, editor, Late Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, Westport, 1997. Articles: Tarr, Susan, and Hans Proppe, ‘‘The Travelling Players: A Modern Greek Masterpiece,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), Summer 1975. Pappas, P., ‘‘Culture, History and Cinema: A Review of The Travel- ling Players,’’ in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1976–77. Horton, Andrew, ‘‘O Thiasos: The Most Original and Important Film of 1975,’’ Pilgrimage, April 1976. Horton, Andrew, ‘‘O Thiasos: Not So Much a Film as an Experi- ence,’’ Athenian, October 1977. Horton, Andrew, ‘‘Theodoros Angelopoulos and the New Greek Cinema,’’ Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Fall 1981. Wilmington, M., ‘‘Angelopoulos: The Power and The Glory,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1990. Angelopoulous, Theo, and Sylvie Rollet, ‘‘En guise de prologue: Les voyage des comédiens,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 383, January 1993. Pigoullie, J. -F., ‘‘Le voyage des comédiens,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2244, 13 January 1993. Alberto, P., and others, in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), vol. 24, May 1997. *** A young man in a uniform walks onto a stage during a perform- ance and murders an older woman and man. The two actually die on stage. The curtain closes as the audience applauds wildly. The moment takes place more than half way through Angelopoulos’s third feature, O Thiasos, and in this one tightening of a narrative strand which until then had seemed quite loose and desperate, we see drama, history, myth, and personal destinies cross paths. For the young man is Orestes, an actor and young communist in northern Greece during World War II, and the woman and man he has killed O THIASOSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1199 are his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthos, who betrayed his father, Agamemnon, to the Nazis who executed him. At almost four hours in length and as a non-chronological investi- gation of Greek history during the troubled period l939 to 1952, O Thiasos (The Travelling Players) might seem an unlikely film to be considered by many as the most important Greek film ever made, and one of the most significant films shot anywhere in the first 100 years of cinema’s appearance. When it appeared in Greece in l975, Angelopoulos’s poetic historical epic was seen by more Greeks than any other Greek film before it. Angelopoulos has his own distinctive cinematic style, but the immediate appeal to Greeks was the content: he dared to present a Marxist left-wing vision of modern Greek history, including the very painful Civil War of l945–49 in which almost one million Greeks died. No filmmaker before him had dared to do so. Immediately his film became part of a national discourse in a way in which few films have. ‘‘The reason that O Thiasos has had a tremendous impact in Greece,’’ wrote an editor of Athenian at the time of its release, ‘‘is its presentation of a view of events which has been stifled, rarely discussed in polite company, and ignored in official accounts of history.’’ In short, the film suggests what historians such as Dominique Eudes and others have detailed, that many Greeks who were not necessarily communist, worked with the Partisans to help liberate Greece from the Germans and then continued to side with the communists because they were even more disenchanted by right wing monarchists who catered more often to foreign interests than to the needs of the people. With the release of the film in Europe shortly after, O Thiasos swiftly became a cult film for cineastes from London to Rome and around Eastern Europe as well as a favourite for left-wing filmmakers concerned with how to represent ‘‘history’’ on screen successfully without become either too didactic or over simplified. (The apprecia- tion of Angelopoulos’s work was much slower in developing, but with the Museum of Modern Art Retrospective of his films in l992, critical and public interest began to grow.) Bertolucci in Italy, for instance, claimed that his study of Italian history in 1900 (1977) was directly influenced by Angelopoulos’s epic. And at the end of the decade of the l970s, Italian critics went as far as to vote O Thiasos the most important film in the world for the whole decade. Angelopoulos appeared in the late l960s as the most talented among a new generation of Greek filmmakers who ironically came of age cinematically under the difficult restrictions of the military Junta’s rule (1967–74). Having studied film in Paris, Angelopoulos was, like many of his generation, influenced by a variety of ‘‘foreign’’ sources including Japanese cinema, East European models, the French New Wave, and Italian neo-realism. And yet Angelopoulos set out clearly to explore what he has called ‘‘the Other Greece’’ that Greece itself and the outside world had never seen. This ‘‘Other’’ Greece Angelopoulos observes is clearly much more ‘‘Balkan’’ than Medi- terranean, full of towns and villages becoming depopulated by the changes in modern history, neither fully living in the 20th century or in the past, heavily influenced by a legacy of 400 years under Turkish rule and not sure that any future exists. Angelopoulos’s characters are most often shot as stationary figures in grey winter landscapes rather than as passionate lovers, dancers, and warriors seen in Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek. Angelopoulos intertwines Greek myth and history in provocative ways. The travelling players are a troupe of actors wandering the small towns and villages of northern Greece performing a simple melodrama about a shepherd girl, ‘‘Golfo.’’ But their drama is constantly interrupted by ‘‘history’’ as the Italians invade in l939, followed shortly after by the Nazis, and, after the war, by the Civil War itself. The final ‘‘invasion’’ is seen to be that of the American influence on Greece. Yet the actions and characters are reflected off an ancient mythical heritage as we learn the individual troupe members are named Electra, Orestes, and Aegisthos as we have already seen. We are thus invited to consider the parallels and differences between these modern representatives of the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus. Angelopoulos offers no simplistic ‘‘update’’ or direct one-on-one correspondence between ancient myths and modern realities. In fact, he forces us to consider how different modern history has become from the reality of ancient drama and myth. No gods enter the scene in O Thiasos. Instead we see a family and a troupe torn apart by political divisions as some choose to join partisan communist forces both during World War II and during the Civil War that followed, while others, especially, Aegisthos, the ‘‘traitor,’’ become collaborators with the Germans and with right wing forces after the war. Beyond the content, however, is Angelopoulos’s striking vis- ual style. He champions the long take shot in long distance. At a time when film, video, and television have converged to offer audiences faster and faster editing as seen especially on music videos and television commercials, Angelopoulos has turned to a more poetic and medita- tive cinema through the haunting camera work of Giorgos Arvanitis, with whom he has worked his entire career. One tracking shot, for instance, in O Thiasos follows a group of left-wing protesters down the street of a Greek town. But in that single shot lasting over six minutes, three different time periods are captured, suggesting visu- ally, therefore, the link of ‘‘protest’’ which bridges time. His framing in long shots also helps to de-dramatize each scene. In many ways, Angelopoulos’s art is that of what he leaves out: extreme violence, passion, conflict. He also breaks up any possibility of smooth Hollywood styled linear narrative or character development by having the characters turn from time to time to the camera and deliver long monologues as if they have known us well some other time, some other place. When Agamemnon is betrayed (as in the myth and drama), he is taken before a Nazi firing squad. But before he dies, he faces the camera in close up and explains who he is, ending with the simple question, ‘‘And who are you?’’ We then cut to an extreme long shot on a grey winter morning as he is shot dead and crumples to the ground. As in the whole epic, this moment asks us to consider a life rather than observe a bloodbath using the conventions of cinematic war violence. Finally, Angelopoulos’s epic is a cyclical one. We begin and end with the travelling players, travelling. They are standing, suitcases in hand, at the same train station in the opening and in the closing of the film, yet the difference in years is significant: the opening shot is in l952, after the war and the Civil War, while the closing shot is l939, poised just before these momentous changes take place. We have ended at the beginning and must leave the cinema asking ourselves if history merely repeats itself or if such an inverted circle suggests any possibility of advancement. Twenty years after the THE THIN MAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1200 release of this landmark film, we still respond to the beauty and warnings enclosed in Angelopoulos’s haunting text. —Andrew Horton THE THIN MAN USA, 1934 Director: W. S. Van Dyke Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 91 minutes. Released June 1934. Filmed during 12 days (some sources list 16 days) of 1934 in MGM studios. Producer: Hunt Stromberg; screenplay: Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett; photography: James Wong Howe; editor: Robert J. Kern; sound recordist: Doug- las Shearer; art director: Cedric Gibbons; music: Dr. William Axt; costume designer: Dolly Tree. Cast: William Powell (Nick Charles); Myrna Loy (Nora Charles); Maureen O’Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant); Nat Pendleton (John Guild); Minna Gombell (Mira Wynant Jorgensen); Porter Hall (MacCauley); Cesar Romero (Chris Jorgensen); Henry Wadsworth (Tommy); Wil- liam Henry (Gilbert); Harold Huber (Nunheim); Natalie Moorhead (Julia); Edward Brophy (Morelli); Edward Ellis (Clyde Wynant); Cyril Thornton (Tanner); Thomas Jackson (Reporter); Ruth Chan- ning (Mrs. Jorgensen); Gertrude Short (Gloria); Walter Long (Study Burke); Clay Clement (Quinn); Rolfe Sedan (Kellner); Bert Roach (Foster); Creighton Hale (Reporter). Publications Books: Cannom, Robert, Van Dyke and the Mythical City of Hollywood, Culver City, California, 1948. Baxter, John, Hollywood in the Thirties, New York, 1968. Nolan, William, Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook, Santa Barbara, 1969. Higham, Charles, Hollywood Cameramen, Bloomington, Indiana, 1970. Everson, William K., The Detective in Film, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1972. Cawelti, John, Adventure, Mystery, Romance, Chicago, 1976. Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Myrna Loy, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1980. Francisco, Charles, Gentleman: The William Powell Story, New York, 1985. Kotsilibas-Davis, James, and Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, New York, 1987. Van Dyke, W.S., W.S. Van Dyke’s Journal: White Shadows in the South Seas, 1927–1928: and Other Van Dyke on Van Dyke, Lanham, 1996. Articles: New York Times, 30 June 1934. Variety (New York), 3 July 1934. New Republic (New York), 25 November 1934. Stage (New York), January 1937. Jacobs, Jack, ‘‘William Powell,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1958. Ringgold, Gene, ‘‘Myrna Loy,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1963. Braun, E., ‘‘Myrna Loy on Comedy,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), March 1968. Dumont, Hervé, ‘‘Woody S. Van Dyke et l’age d’or d’Hollywood,’’ in Travelling (Lausanne), no. 37, 1973. Sanders, Gregory, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), no. 1, 1975. Dumont, Hervé, ‘‘W. S. Van Dyke (1889–1943),’’ in Anthologie du cinéma, Paris, 1975. Black, Louis, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 18 Janu- ary 1978. Roddick, Nick, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. ‘‘James Wong Howe,’’ in Film Dope (London), November 1982. Tessier, Max, in Image et Son (Paris), November 1982. Buckley, M., ‘‘A Tribute to Myrna Loy,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1985. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 5, 1990. Szebin, Frederick C., ‘‘Hammett Rewritten,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 45, no. 7–8, July-August 1994. Drees, R., ‘‘The Thin Man: Dashiell Hammett and Hollywood,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 46, September/October 1995. *** The Thin Man is one of the brightest and most sophisticated comedy/mysteries of the 1930s. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel of the same name, the film combines the elements of a classic detective story with overtones of the screwball comedies that had their heyday during the Depression. The result is a lighthearted murder mystery featuring perhaps the most engaging married couple in Hollywood’s history: Nick and Nora Charles. Screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett capture both the wit and the style of Hammett’s original story. As is true of all good mysteries, strong character development is central to The Thin Man’s success. In the wealthy, fun-loving Charleses, film-going audiences THE THIN MANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1201 The Thin Man soon discovered something that was quite new by Hollywood stan- dards—a husband and wife who thoroughly enjoyed their marriage. The reverent tones with which the film industry had previously addressed the institution of matrimony had left little room for the playfulness and high spirits that mark Nick and Nora’s relationship. For them, marriage is clearly an extended love affair, and the film conveys the enviable combination of companionship and romance that sets the pair apart from their staid counterparts in other films. Dashiell Hammett is said to have modeled the Charleses on his own long-standing relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman, but for film enthusiasts the characters have become inextricably tied to the performers who brought them life. For both William Powell and Myrna Loy, The Thin Man represented a critical career milestone. Each had worked extensively in silent films, Powell playing dapper villains and Loy finding herself cast repeatedly as exotic vamps. The film’s popular success, however, established Powell as a wisecrack- ing, debonair leading man, while Loy’s delightful portrayal of Nora was the beginning of her reign as Hollywood’s ‘‘ideal wife.’’ Over the next decade, the two would recreate their roles in five ‘‘Thin Man’’ sequels, and although none of the subsequent films ever quite equalled the effortless charm of the original, Powell and Loy re- mained perfectly paired throughout the series. Goodrich and Hackett’s script must share credit for The Thin Man’s breezy style and rapid pacing with the direction of W. W. ‘‘Woody’’ Van Dyke. Although Van Dyke’s work has not won him a place alongside the John Fords and Howard Hawkses of the American cinema, he enjoyed a reputation during the 1930s as a highly professional director whose films generally proved popular at the box office. His efficient, no-nonsense working earned him the nickname ‘‘One-Take Woody,’’ and he completed The Thin Man in a remarkable 12 days. Given its tight shooting schedule, it is no surprise that the finished film reflects a heady sense of energy and élan. In the years since its release, The Thin Man has spawned a number of imitators, including several successful television series. Connois- seurs of the genre, however, return again and again to Nick and Nora—and their faithful Airedale, Asta—drawn by the appeal of a film that remains fresh and original after 50 years. —Janet E. Lorenz THINGS TO COME FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1202 THINGS TO COME UK, 1936 Director: William Cameron Menzies Production: London Film Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 130 minutes, a shorter version of 96 minutes also exists. Released 1936 by United Artists. Producer: Alexander Korda; screenplay: H. G. Wells and Lajos Biro, from Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come; photogra- phy: Georges Perinal; editor: Charles Crichton; art director: Vin- cent Korda; music: Arthur Bliss; special effects: Ned Mann; special camera effects: Edward Cohen and Harry Zech; costume designers: John Armstrong, René Hubert and the Marchioness of Queensbery. Cast: Raymond Massey (John Cabal/Oswald Cabal); Ralph Rich- ardson (The Boss); Edward Chapman (Pippa Passworthy/Raymond Passworthy); Margaretta Scott (Roxana Black); Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Theotocopulos); Maurice Bardell (Dr. Harding); Sophie Stewart (Mrs. Cabal); Derrick de Marney (Richard Gordon); Ann Todd (Mary Gordon); Pearl Argyle (Katherine Cabal); Kenneth Villiers (Maurice Passworthy); Ivan Brandt (Mitani); Anthony Holles (Simon Burton); Allan Jeayes (Mr. Cabal); John Clements (Airman); Pickles Livingston (Horrie Passworthy); Patricia Hilliard (Janet Gordon); George Sanders (Pilot). Publications Script: Wells, H. G., and Lajos Biro, in The Prophetic Soul: A Reading of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come together with his Film Treatment, Whither Mankind? and the Post Production Script, by Leon Stover, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1987. Books: Balcon, Michael, and others, 20 Years of British Films, 1925–45, London, 1947. Tabori, Paul, Alexander Korda, New York, 1966. Johnson, William, editor, Focus on Science Fiction, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles, London, 1975. Barsacq, Leon, Caligari’s Cabinet and other Grand Illusions: A His- tory of Film Design, New York, 1976. Parish, James Robert, The Science Fiction Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1977. Korda, Michael, Charmed Lives, London, 1979. Stover, Leon E., The Prophetic Soul: A Reading of H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, Together with His Film Treatment, Whither Mankind? and the Postproduction Script, Jefferson, 1987. Frayling, Christopher, Things to Come, London, 1995. O’Connor, Garry, Ralph Richardson: An Actor’s Life, New York, 1999. Articles: Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 28 February 1936. New Statesman and Nation (London), 29 February 1936. Variety (New York), 4 March 1936. Time (New York), 6 April 1936. New York Times, 18 April 1936. Campbell, Colin, ‘‘The Producer: Sir Alexander Korda,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1951. Gilliat, Sidney, Graham Greene, and Ralph Richardson, ‘‘Sir Alexan- der Korda,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Stein, Jeanne, ‘‘Raymond Massey,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1963. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Korda,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 6, Paris, 1965. Roman, Robert, ‘‘Cedric Hardwicke,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1965. Coulson, Alan, ‘‘Ralph Richardson,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1969. McFeeley, Connie, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. American Cinemeditor (Los Angeles), Summer-Fall 1983. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 15, 1995. Burr, Ty, in Entertainment Weekly, no. 335, 12 July 1996. *** One of the most characteristic aspects of science fiction in the 1930s is its being influenced by another fantastic genre—horror—so intensively that in many cases it is hardly possible to establish a dividing line between these two categories of fantastic creation. There are very few movies which are exclusively devoted to consider- ing scientific and societal evolution in terms of an extrapolation into the future. An exception is the English film of 1936, Things to Come. The book on which the film is based, The Shape of Things to Come, is a speculative continuation of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and is, according to the author, ‘‘basically an imaginative discussion about social and political forces and possibilities.’’ The story of the movie covers a period of 100 years of civilization. It begins in 1940, in a time permeated by fear of an imminent war which finally explodes and lasts 25 years. During that period, the entire globe is devastated and almost all of mankind exterminated. However, the human will and spirit remain active, and so at the end of the book, in 2040, a completely different world is depicted, in which human hardships have been eliminated and man is assured of all his material as well as mental needs. Progress is unrelenting as mankind plans to leave Mother Earth and take over the universe. Wells’s work fascinated and still fascinates readers by its original images of the future. Wells himself, however, valued more highly his THINGS TO COMEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1203 Things to Come scientific studies than his fiction, and so the speculative aspect of Things to Come receives more attention than the story. The plot of the film proceeds from Wells’s assumption that a war will mean the end of the Western civilization. The structure of the story is based on a conflict of two forces always present in humanity’s evolution. One of them represents chaos and regression and encourages man’s barbaric nature; and the other represents order, healthy reasoning, scientific progress. When these forces collide, science and intellect win although this victory will always be threatened by other pres- sures, due to our imperfect understanding of how best to invest our human resources. Wells, who wrote the screenplay, was not able to transfer his ideas, opinions, or doubts into a form which would utilize all the compo- nents of the psychic process involved during the perception of a movie. Only the spectator’s intellect and reason are called upon, his emotions remain untouched. In the film, the characters are not people of flesh and blood; they are merely symbols of various ideological convictions. They do not furnish the spectator with an opportunity to penetrate into the soul and mind in order to identify with them. Director William Cameron Menzies, who was working with actors for the first time, was unable, because of his lack of experience, to influence the movie’s screenplay as much as the production design. He concentrates fully on the visual aspect of the movie, its structuralizations, sets, and special effects. From this point of view, the film attracted well-merited attention and, till the present time, has kept its place in film history precisely for its remarkable formal design. Cameron Menzies thoughtfully composed the movie’s space; his plastic fantasy triumphs especially in his presentation of a city of the future where he exhibits a sense of balance and visual contrast. The sets dominate the action as well as the characters who, deprived of their psychological hinterland, become the compositions’s style- creating element. The refined sophistication of Ned Mann’s special effects and his extraordinary miniature models and buildings give the impression of a ‘‘life size’’ dimension, and create a sense of unity of space and man. Some objects look real and concrete although they are a product of more fantasy, such as the machine by which the new city is built, or the attack of delta-winged airplanes which he used despite the protests of contemporary experts. Wells in his screenplay revealed a spirit of vision not only in details but also in basic principle—he announced the coming of the Second World War. The English public received the idea of an air attack on London with laughter; after a few years, however, this fiction became reality. THE THIRD MAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1204 The filming of this ambitious movie devoured a significant sum of money. The producer never recovered his investment, but Things to Come remains a testament to its creator’s thoughtful examination of mankind’s path into the future, and it occupies an important place in the history of the science fiction genre. —B. Urgo?íkova THE THIRD MAN UK, 1949 Director: Carol Reed Production: British Lion Films; black and white, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes, another version exists at 104 minutes. Released 1949. Filmed on location in Vienna. Producers: Carol Reed with Hugh Perceval; screenplay: Graham Greene; photography: Robert Krasker; editor: Oswald Hafenrichter; art director: Vincent Korda; music: Anton Karas. Cast: Joseph Cotten (Holly Martins); Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt); Trevor Howard (Major Calloway); Orson Welles (Harry Lime); Bernard Lee (Sergeant Paine); Ernst Deutsch (Baron Kurtz); Erich Ponto (Dr. Winkel); Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin); Siegfried Breuer (Popesco); Paul Hoerbiger (Harry’s porter); Hedwig Bleibtreu (Anna’s old woman); Frederick Schreicker (Hansel’s father); Herbert Halbik (Hansel); Jenny Werner (Winkel’s maid); Nelly Arno (Kurtz’s mother); Alexis Chesnakov (Brodsky); Leo Bieber (Barman); Paul Smith (M.P.). Awards: Best Film, Cannes Film Festival, 1949; Oscar for Best Cinematography (black and white), 1950. Publications Script: Greene, Graham, The Third Man, London and New York, 1968; as The Third Man: A Film by Graham Greene and Carol Reed, New York, 1984. Books: Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles, Berkeley, 1971. Phillips, Gene D., Graham Greene: The Films of His Fiction, New York, 1974. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pic- tures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. McBride, J., Orson Welles: Actor and Director, New York, 1977. Bergala, Alain, and Jean Narboni, editors, Orson Welles, Paris, 1982. Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography, New York, 1985. Knight, Vivienne, Trevor Howard: A Gentleman and a Player, London, 1986. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles: A Celebration, London, 1986. Moss, Robert F., Films of Carol Reed, New York, 1987. Wapshott, Nicholas, The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed, London, 1990. Wapshott, Nicholas, Carol Reed: A Biography, New York, 1994. Drazin, Charles, In Search of the Third Man, New York, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 7 September 1950. Wright, Basil, ‘‘A Study of Carol Reed,’’ in The Year’s Work in the Film, edited by Roger Manvell, London, 1950. Sequence (London), New York, 1950. Time (New York), 6 February 1950. Life (New York), 13 March 1950. De La Roche, Catherine, ‘‘A Man with No Message,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1954. Manvell, Roger, in The Film and the Public (London), 1955. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Carol Reed in the Context of His Time,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 10, 1956. Sarris, Andrew, in Films and Filming (London), September and October 1957. Fawcett, Marion, ‘‘Sir Carol Reed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1959. Denby, David, in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, New York, 1973. Voight, Michael, ‘‘Pictures of Innocence: Sir Carol Reed,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Spring 1974. Gomez, J. A., ‘‘The Third Man: Capturing the Visual Essence of Literary Conception,’’ and ‘‘Narrative Structure in The Third Man,’’ by W. F. Van Wert, in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury, Maryland), Fall 1974. Carpenter, Lynette, ‘‘I Never Knew the Old Vienna: Cold War Politics and The Third Man,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), 1978. Classic Film Collector (Indiana, Pennsylvania), July 1979. Fineman, Daniel D., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Palmer, J. W., and M. M. Riley, ‘‘The Lone Rider in Vienna: Myth and Meaning in The Third Man,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1980. Weemaes, G., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), November 1982. Listener (London), 18 December 1986. Driver, P., ‘‘A Third Man Cento,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 1, 1989–90. Chatman, S., ‘‘Who is the Best Narrator? The Case of The Third Man,’’ in Style (Toronto), no. 2, 1989. McFarlane, B., in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 92, Sum- mer 1993. Man, G. K. S., ‘‘The Third Man: Pulp Fiction and Art Film,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1993. Kemp, Philip, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 4, April 1994. Thompson, D., ‘‘Reeds and Trees,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, July/August 1994. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 16, 1995. Naremore, J., ‘‘High Modernism and Blood Melodrama: The Case of Graham Greene,’’ in Iris, no. 21, Spring 1996. THE THIRD MANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1205 The Third Man Raskin, R., ‘‘Closure in The Third Man: On the Dynamics of an Unhappy Ending,’’ in P.O.V., vol. 2, December 1996. Mandolini, C., in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 189/190, March/ June 1997. Premiere (Boulder), vol. 10, June 1997. Gribble, Jim, ‘‘The Third Man: Graham Green [sic] and Carol Reed,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 3, July 1998. Wollen, Peter, ‘‘The Vienna Project,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 9, no. 7, July 1999. *** Carol Reed’s The Third Man is a remarkably enigmatic film in many respects, drawing on a range of talents and traditions so broad as to raise the question of authorship in a particularly acute form. The film owes debts to the Grierson/Rotha tradition of British documen- tary film, as well as to the post-war neo-realism of Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta and DeSica’s Ladri di Biciclette; like its Italian predeces- sors, The Third Man studies the effects of post-war economic and social corruption within the context of a once grand though now rubble-strewn European capital (Rome for the neo-realists, Vienna for Reed). And debts are also owed to the moralistic detective fiction of Graham Greene (who wrote the original screenplay), as well as to the similarly Catholic tradition of Hitchcock’s pre-war British thrill- ers (e.g., The 39 Steps). But overshadowing all of these influences is the presence of Orson Welles in the role of Harry Lime. Welles wrote much of his own dialogue; as in Citizen Kane he is once again paired with Joseph Cotten, who plays his boyhood friend Holly Martins; even the film’s overtly stylized use of camera angles, of expressionist lighting, of stairways, owes much to the Wellesian style. Indeed, The Third Man is very much a film about authorship, or about art more generally, and the issue raised is very much one of artistic ethics. Thus the film’s three major characters are all artists of one sort or another— and the range of their actions and motives helps to define our sense of the film’s theme. Holly Martins, for instance, is a Western novelist (when asked about artistic influences he cites Zane Grey) whose initial interest in the investigation of the ‘‘death’’ of Harry Lime involves his convic- tion that Harry was a victim of ‘‘the sheriff’’ (i.e., the British military police) whose death Holly (‘‘the lone rider’’) must avenge. Later he even says he is planning a new novel, based on fact, to be called ‘‘The Third Man.’’ Likewise Anna—Harry’s girlfriend (whom he betrays 38 - AUCH DAS WAR WIEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1206 to the Russians)—is an actress; and her willingness to betray Harry involves both ignorance (she doesn’t know he betrayed her) and a melodramatic sense of her role as the doomed man’s mistress (she even sleeps in Harry’s pajamas). But clearly the film’s central figure, its central artist, is Harry Lime himself. The complex relationship of money and art is a primary theme of the Wellesian cinema—and in The Third Man it finds vivid expression in the use Lime makes of art, to throw the occupation authorities off his trail and to further his traffic in black market drugs (diluted penicillin especially). Hence Lime plans and stage-manages his own death, even playing a part as ‘‘the third man’’ who helps to carry the body (actually, that of an implicated associate) from the street where it was run down by a truck; and he calls his boyhood friend, Holly Martins, to Vienna to serve as his stand in. The connection of art and corruption is confirmed in Harry’s famous ‘‘cuckoo clock’’ speech wherein the political intrigues of the Borgias are correlated with the aesthetic triumphs of Michelangelo and da Vinci. There is something remarkably childish and self-indulgent about Lime’s perspective—as evidenced by the fact that he utters the line at an amusement park. But Holly gets another view of childhood, when Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) takes him to the hospital ward populated by Lime’s victims, all children; and ‘‘The Third Man,’’ as Holly eventually ‘‘rewrites’’ the story, becomes a parable of social responsibility. It is Holly who finally pulls the trigger and puts the wounded Lime out of his cynical misery. —Leland Poague 38 - AUCH DAS WAR WIEN (38 - Vienna Before the Fall) Austria, 1986 Director: Wolfgang Glück Production: SATEL-Fernseh-und Filmproduktionsges.m.b.H, Vienna/ Almaro Film Munich; color, 35 mm, running time: 97 minutes. Released 4 September 1986 in Venice (‘‘Venezia speciali’’). Producers: Michael Wolkenstein, Boris Otto Dworak; screenplay: Wolfgang Glück, Lida Winiewicz (collaboration on dialogues), based on the novel by Friedrich Torberg, Auch das war Wien; photogra- phy: Gerhard Vandenberg; editor: Heidi Handorf; art director: Herwig Libowitzky; music arranger: Bert Grund; sound: Werner B?hm. Cast: Tobias Engel (Martin Hofmann); Sunnyi Melles (Carola Hell); Heinz Trixner (Toni Drechsler); Romuald Pekny (Sovary); Ingrid Burkhard (Frau Schostal); Lukas Resetarits (cab driver); Lotte Ledl (Carola’s mother). Awards: Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film, 1986; Austrian Film Prize, 1987. Publications Books: Ernst, Gustav, and Gerhard Schedl, editors, Nahaufnahmen: Zur Situation des ?sterreichischen Kinofilms, Vienna and Zurich, 1992. Articles: Austrian Film Commission, Austrian Films 1981–1986 and Ten Selected Films 1976–80, Vienna, 1988. *** The Austrian director Wolfgang Glück (born 1929) created 38 at a time when it was not yet common in film or literature for Austrians to address the Nazi past. Except for Peter Turrini’s six-part television series Alpensaga (1976–1980), the topic was generally avoided since Austria had been deemed the first victim of Hitler, obviating any need to discuss the issue of war guilt. In this sense the film, released in 1986, served as prelude to the widespread media coverage and the many books, articles, and international conferences that appeared in 1988, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (the political unification of Nazi Germany and Austria). Glück’s filmscript, written with Lida Winiewiecz, is based on the novel Auch das war Wien by Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979). (Glück had made a very successful television film from Torberg’s most famous novel, Der Schüler Gerber in 1981.) Torberg had emigrated to the United States during World War II and returned to become one of the most influential personalities in Austrian cultural life. A fervent anti-Communist, he joined with Hans Weigel during the Cold War to mount the infamous ‘‘Brecht Boykott.’’ Later it was found that his magazine Forum was secretly financed by the United States. Torberg had written Auch das war Wien before he left Austria, but he decided against publishing this book, which was critical of Vienna, because he planned to return and work in Austria. His widow discovered the manuscript after his death and published it. The film presents the political events surrounding the Anschluss in March of 1938 through the lives of Carola Hell, a popular young actress at the prestigious Theater in der Josefstadt, and Martin Hofmann, the Jewish journalist she plans to marry. When we encoun- ter the couple in the lovely springtime weather their future is full of promise. They are determined to stay clear of politics. Yet in the climate of the time, nobody of her prominence or his religion can remain apolitical. Although Martin’s journalist friend, Drechsler, calls to inform them that the Nazis plan to take over Austria soon, they concentrate on their work and their private happiness and dismiss the warnings. As they did with many writers, artists, and film people, the Nazis try to win Carola over to their cause by showing her the benefits of cooperation. They invite her to make a film and to perform in Berlin, and, despite her misgivings, she feels she must oblige them in the interest of her career, for the Nazis control the theaters in Austria. She is treated royally in Berlin and yet knows she is constantly under surveillance. She gets a taste of Nazi power when she openly criticizes the harassment of Jews and is detained for an educational ‘‘briefing,’’ which includes the suggestion that it is not advisable for her to have a Jewish friend. THE 39 STEPSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1207 The film shows Chancellor Schuschnigg’s efforts to forestall Hitler by calling for a national referendum on the question of the Anschluss on March 13. Despite his efforts, the occupation begins on March 11. Carola, who has disclosed that she is pregnant, and Martin are attending a cabaret with friends when the news comes, and they discover the Nazis taking over the city. The film reaches its dramatic climax in scenes showing the panicked and frenetic attempts of Austrians to flee the country before the borders are closed. Glück excellently conveys the incredible rapidity of the takeover, thanks to the lengthy preparation and cooperation of Austrian National Social- ists, who now no longer have to hide their affiliation. Carola and Martin head for the train station to travel to Prague, still a free city. She is allowed to board the train, but he is prevented from accompa- nying her. Guards haul him away and beat him. He seeks refuge with friends, but while all are sympathetic, they are too afraid to help him. Martin accepts his fate and walks along the streets until he is arrested. 1938 effectively dramatizes the events leading up to the German annexation of Austria, showing how the Nazis infiltrated the coun- try’s organizations, bribed the writers and artists, undermined the government, and intimidated the populace to prepare the way for the takeover. It also shows how the public tried to ignore the Nazi threat, and the way many Jews overlooked the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere and actions, until it was too late to stop the German occupation. —Gertraud Steiner Daviau THE 39 STEPS UK, 1935 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Gaumont-British; black and white, 35mm; running time: 81 minutes. Released June 1935. Filmed in Lime Grove studios. Producers: Michael Balcon with Ivor Montagu; screenplay: Charles Bennett and Alma Reville, additional dialogue by Ian Hay, from the novel by John Buchan; photography: Bernard Knowles; editor: Derek Twist; sound: A. Birch; production designers: Otto Wendorff and Albert Jullion; music: Louis Levy; costume designer: J. Strassner. Cast: Madeleine Carroll (Pamela); Robert Donat (Richard Hannay); Lucie Mannheim (Miss Smith/Annabella); Godfrey Tearle (Professor Jordan); Peggy Ashcroft (Margaret); John Laurie (John); Helen Haye (Mrs. Jordan); Wylie Watson (Mister Memory); Frank Cellier (Sheriff Watson); Peggy Simpson (Young girl); Gus McNaughton and Jerry Vernon (2 Voyagers); Miles Malleson (Director of the Palladium). Publications Script: Bennett, Charles, and Alma Reville, Les 39 Marches, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 June 1980. Books: Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965; revised edition, as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, New York, 1989. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Le Cinema selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Trewin, J. C., Robert Donat: A Biography, London, 1968. LaValley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Spy Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1974. Spoto, Donald, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1976. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of the British Cinema, London, 1978. Taylor, John Russell, Hitch, London, 1978. Fieschi, J. -A., and others, Hitchcock, Paris, 1981. Mast, Gerald, A Short History of the Movies, New York, 1981. Browne, Nick, The Rhetoric of Film Narration, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1982. Cook, David, A Narrative History of Film, New York, 1982. Norboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitch- cock, New York, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Ryall, Tom, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, London, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Brill, Lesley, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films, Princeton, 1988. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Condon, Pauline, Complete Hitchcock, London, 1999. Mogg, Ken, Alfred Hitchcock Story, Dallas, 1999. Articles: Spectator (London), 14 June 1935. New Statesman and Nation (London), 22 June 1935. New York Times, 14 September 1935. Variety (New York), 18 September 1935. Hitchcock, Alfred, ‘‘My Own Methods,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1937. Anderson, Lindsay, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock,’’ in Sequence (London), Autumn 1949. THE 39 STEPS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1208 The 39 Steps Harcourt-Smith, Simon, in Sight and Sound (London), July 1950. ‘‘Hitchcock Anglais,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1956. Pett, John, in Films and Filming (London), November and Decem- ber 1959. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Hitchcock’s World,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Winter 1962–63. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1970. Richards, Jeffrey, ‘‘A Star Without Armour: Robert Donat,’’ in Focus on Film (London), no. 8, 1971. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), September-October 1973. Roud, Richard, ‘‘In Broad Daylight,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1974. McDougal, S. Y., ‘‘Mirth, Sexuality, and Suspense: Alfred Hitch- cock’s Adaptation of The 39 Steps,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Summer 1975. Goldstein, R. M., in Film News (New York), January-February 1979. Graham, Olive, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 5 Febru- ary 1979. Slide, Anthony, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Scarrone, C., in Filmcritica (Florence), January 1981. Jameux, D., ‘‘The ‘Secret’ in Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps,’’ in On Film (Los Angeles), Summer 1983. Thomas, F., in Positif (Paris), July-August 1984. Hark, I. R., ‘‘Keeping Your Amateur Standing: Audience Participa- tion and Good Citizenship in Hitchcock’s Political Films,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 2, 1990. Cohen, T., ‘‘Graphics, Letters, and Hitchcock’s Steps,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier, Ohio), no. 1, 1992. Phillips, Louis, ‘‘The Hitchcock Universe: Thirty-nine Steps and Then Some,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March-April 1995. ’’Le grande stagione inglese,’’ in Castoro Cinema, July/August 1996. Worden, J., ‘‘Thirty-nine Steps to Immortality,’’ in Armchair Detec- tive, vol. 29, no. 4, 1996. *** When he completed The 39 Steps, director Alfred Hitchcock explained his reasons for doing the film: ‘‘I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilization has become so screen- ing and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first- hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish and jellified, we TIEFLANDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1209 have to experience them artificially.’’ The film first brought Hitch- cock to the attention of United States film-goers and initiated refer- ence to the director as ‘‘the master’’ in his native England. The pairing of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll—the suave, clever, attractive man and the cool, intelligent blonde—helped to reinforce the pattern of Hitchcockian protagonists that would recur in many of his later films. Many critics and viewers alike feel the The 39 Steps is one of Hitchcock’s finest films; in fact, viewer response to the film today is often as enthusiastic as during the time of its release. Adapted from a novel by John Buchan, the movie gave Hitchcock the opportunity to display his finest non-stop action sequences. Most notably, it com- bines what would become Hitchcock’s most often-treated themes with imaginative sound and visual techniques. Numerous scenes in The 39 Steps have become cinema classics, particularly those merging suspense with surprise, humor with anxi- ety: the murdered, mysterious spy who, after warning him that ‘‘they’ll get you too,’’ slumps over Donat’s bed revealing the knife in her back; the surprise when master-spy Geoffrey Tearle shows Donat his ‘‘half-pinkie,’’ the top-joint of his finger missing; the funny and ironic sexual implications of adversaries Carroll and Donat handcuffed together, pretending to be newlyweds, ‘‘forced’’ to spend the night together. (As she removes her stockings, his hand must coast along with hers down her legs—‘‘May I be of assistance?’’ he asks.) And Hitchcock’s technical virtuosity highlights what is perhaps his most famous scene transition, used first in Blackmail: the cham- bermaid finds the spy’s body and shrieks, her cries blended to the screaming whistle of a train as the plot ‘‘relentlessly moves forward.’’ Hitchcock’s use of sound and careful lighting heighten the suspense— and humor—of the film. Throughout the melée in the music hall during the first sequence, persistent members of the audience ask, ‘‘What causes Pip in poultry?’’ and ‘‘How old is Mae West?’’ as the crowded mise-en-scène and the fast-paced editing reinforce the confusion. The 39 Steps also featured one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes: the innocent caught in bizarre circumstances that he or she doesn’t understand. The plot and its loopholes, however, provide the forum for the hero to do his or her ‘‘stuff,’’ to demonstrate a charm and cleverness in getting out of tight spots. As the confusing plot plays itself out, however, audiences are far more interested in the characters’ relationships than in the overall impetus for the narrative. In fact, the original point of the title was forgotten, and a line had to be added to the script at the end by way of explanation. The 39 Steps then also illustrates the celebrated Hitchcockian ‘‘McGuffin’’—‘‘what everybody on the screen is looking for, but the audience don’t care.’’ Particularly effective in the film are rapid changes of situation and Hitchcock’s obvious contention that nothing is sacred, especially if a location or situation can be used to demonstrate the cleverness of his protagonist. Even patriotic parades and political lectures aren’t safe from the thrilling chase: Donat escapes from a police station, ducks into a public hall where he is mistaken for a guest speaker, then gives an impromptu, rousing political address to a responsive audience. All of these events foreshadow Cary Grant’s escape from killers at an auction and his flight from the same murderers around the Mount Rushmore National Monument in North by Northwest (1959); with Hitchcock, traditional connotations of safety and danger often reverse. Visually, The 39 Steps enabled Hitchcock to transfer some of his skills as a director of silent films: the camera at long-shot lingers on an open window, curtains blowing in and around its frame on a stormy London night. This effective bit of ‘‘mood-setting’’ precedes revela- tion of the woman spy’s murder. Later on in the film, we look through the window of a crofter’s cottage from his point of view; within that tight frame, we witness the conspiritual, silent ‘‘dialogue’’ between Donat and Peggy Ashcroft, the crofter’s kind wife. As with his use of sound, these sequences illustrate Hitchcock’s mastery of a medium in which absence of dialogue or music can be strikingly effective. Sydney Carroll, writing in the London Sunday Times, said: ‘‘In The 39 Steps the identity and mind of Alfred Hitchcock are continuously discernible, in fact supreme. There is no doubt that Hitchcock is a genius. He is the real star of the film.’’ And interestingly, two ‘‘modern’’ remakes of the film pale miserably in comparison with the original. —Deborah Holdstein THREE COLORS: BLUE, WHITE, RED See TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGE THE THREEPENNY OPERA See DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER TIEFLAND Germany/Austria, 1945/1954 Director: Leni Riefenstahl Production: Leni Riefenstahl Produktion; black and white; running time: 98 minutes. Filmed in Spain, the Austrian Alps, the Dolomites, and Barrandov Studios in Prague between 1942 and 1945. Footage confiscated by French occupation forces and returned incomplete to Riefenstahl, who then edited it for a February 1954 Austrian and West German release by Tobis. Producer: Leni Riefenstahl; screenplay: Leni Riefenstahl; based on the opera Tiefland by Eugene d’Albert; photography: Albert Benitz; Trude Lechle; assistant director: G. W. Pabst; editor: Leni Riefenstahl; sound: Rudolf Kaiser and Herbert Janeczka; produc- tion designers: Erich Grave and Isabella Ploberger; music: Eugene d’Albert, with new compositions by Herbert Windt; performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; production managers: Walter Traut and Max Hüske; consultant: Harald Reinl. Cast: Leni Riefenstahl (Martha); Franz Eichberger (Pedro); Bernhard Minetti (Marquez Don Sebastian); Aribert W?scher (Camillo); Maria Koppenh?fer (Donna Amelia); Luis Rainer (Old Shepherd); Frieda Richard (Josefa); Karl Skraup (Mayor); Max Holzboer (The Miller); Mena Main (Miller’s Wife). TIEFLAND FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1210 Tiefland Publications Books: Hinton, David, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Berg-Pan, Renata, Leni Riefenstahl, Boston, 1980. Riefenstahl, Leni, Memoiren, Munich, 1987. Riefenstahl, Leni, A Memoir, New York, 1993. Articles: Gunston, David, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 14, no. 1, Fall 1960. Brownlow, Kevin, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Film (London), Win- ter 1966. Delahaye, Michael, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Interviews with Film Directors, Indianapolis, 1968. Rich, B. Ruby, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: The Deceptive Myth,’’ in Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, New York, 1979. Rentschler, Eric, ‘‘Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light,’’ in October, no. 48, Spring 1989. Schulte-Sasse, Linda, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic,’’ in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, Carbondale, 1992. Sanders-Brahms, Helma, ‘‘Tyrannenmord: Tiefland von Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Das Dunkle zwischen den Bildern: Essays, Portr?ts, Kritiken, Frankfurt 1992. Von Dassanowsky, Robert, ‘‘‘Wherever You May Run, You Cannot Escape Him’: Leni Riefenstahl’s Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington, Indiana), no. 35, May 1995. *** Considering the ongoing interest in Leni Riefenstahl and the most recent attempts by academics to find something in her work that would satisfy her critics or release her from cinematic exile, it is inexplicable that Riefenstahl’s final dramatic film, Tiefland, has received so little attention. German filmmaker Helma Sanders-Brahms TIEFLANDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1211 asks: ‘‘How is it possible that after fifty years the fear of dealing with this film is still so great that just the refusal to view it is considered a correct attitude for German intellectuals?’’ The answer might be that the film would threaten much of the static image scholarship has dealt Riefenstahl and her work. Riefenstahl originally considered Tiefland a likely follow-up to her first directorial effort, Das blaue Licht (1932), but Sieg des Glaubens (1933), Triumph des Willens (1935), and Olympia (1938) delayed this possible project. The film adaptation of the Eugene d’Albert (1864–1932) opera, Tiefland, with libretto by Rudolph Lothar (based on the 1896 Spanish play Terra Baixa by Angel Guimera) was reconsidered in 1939. Since Tiefland was not consid- ered valuable for propaganda purposes it was given none of the financial support Riefenstahl requested from the government. Tiefland became Riefenstahl’s ‘‘inner emigration’’ from the hostility of the Nazi inner circle, the shock of the war, and her slow disillusionment with Hitler. The footage was subsequently confiscated by the French government and returned incomplete to Riefenstahl after her several years in detention camps and her final clearance by French courts. Due to the lost material (shot early in the production in Spain), she has never been satisfied with the final edit. In 1949, a West German magazine claimed that Riefenstahl used Gypsy inmates from concen- tration camps as extras and mistreated them during the filming. A Munich court found Riefenstahl innocent of the charges that same year, but she has had to repeatedly defend herself against renewed charges based on the original libelous assertion. Tiefland opens with a visual/musical poem on the beauty of nature and the tranquility of the mountains. The long shots emphasize space and freedom, a nature-worship more reminiscent of Arnold Fanck’s early Bergfilme than of the mountain images in Das blaue Licht, where filtered daylight suggests a haunted twilight setting. Here, the view is clear and bright, offered without sophisticated technical manipulation. The isolated human inhabitant of Tiefland’s mountains is Pedro the shepherd (Franz Eichberger), whose hut we enter. Pedro is awakened by his dog, which warns him of a wolf threatening the sheep. Berg-Pan has commented on this symbolism of innocence in the confrontation between sheep and wolf: ‘‘One wonders how the director and the Nazi authorities reconciled such action with Ger- many’s own attacks on largely defenseless neighbors.’’ The emphasis is unambiguous and it foreshadows the climax of the film. Pedro fights the wolf with his bare hands as they roll down the hill in mortal struggle. Having strangled the wolf, Pedro washes his wounds in the river and gently bathes the injured paw of his dog. Like Junta in Das blaue Licht and the torchbearer from Mount Olympus in the prologue to Olympia, Pedro descends the mountain as the pure, nature-bound, and mystically empowered force. He passes through arid fields where tired peasants beg the Marquez’s repre- sentative to let the river, undammed by the Marquez, flow back to their drought-stricken land. The overseer rejects their plea and informs them that the Marquez needs the water for his bulls. In the village, Pedro passes a covered gypsy wagon in which Martha (Riefenstahl) ties her shoes in preparation for her dance. The erotic tension between the Marquez and Martha is undeniable, but Martha is attracted to him because she misunderstands him to be both powerful and kind; when he discovers her gypsy companion has beaten her, he promises no one will hurt her again. Martha accepts this as Riefenstahl accepted Hitler, naively avoiding the obvious or wishing only to see self-serving aspects—a powerful man who will give her an important and protected existence. Indeed, Riefenstahl’s opportunism on behalf of her art and fame governed her early life. As Martha dances for the Marquez (and his guitar accompaniment) to become his pampered mistress, so Riefenstahl filmed for Hitler (and his ideology) to become a renowned artist. A number of elements in the film enforce Riefenstahl’s use of the relationship between Martha and the Marquez to represent her Nazi experience. As she accepts her position in the castle and gives herself to the Marquez, Martha’s gypsy dresses, the costume of (other) ethnicity and her art, are replaced by those of a noblewoman. These elitist outfits are uniforms that connect her to the ruling order and label her a possession of the Marquez. In her most masculine dress of the film, which in military-like regimentation mimics the Marquez’s suit, Martha implores the Marquez to communicate with the drought- stricken peasants. His preceding ride through the town with Martha, who witnesses his reception as Riefenstahl witnessed Hitler’s for the camera, and his arrogant consideration of the peasant’s requests, quote Hitler’s tour of Nuremberg in the early segments of Triumph des Willens. Unlike those moments, however, the poor crowds of Tiefland do not welcome or cheer their ‘‘Führer’’ but curse him in anger and misery. Martha, like Riefenstahl, who has admitted as much, is possessed by a leader she agreed to serve and whose sudden cruelty contradicts his generous behavior to her. One must also consider that Bernhard Minetti’s Marquez bears a strong physical resemblance to Goebbels. Like the Propaganda Minister, the Marquez is known for his sexual dalliances and his abuse of Martha mimics Goebbels’ alleged verbal assaults on Riefenstahl. The capitalist support of authoritarian rule is introduced in the figure of Donna Amelia (Maria Koppenh?ffer), the daughter of the Mayor (Karl Skraup), who is goaded on by her father to become the wife of the Marquez for a sizeable amount of money. The Marquez requires her finances to resolve his debts and Donna Amelia is therefore treated as a possession to be bartered by her father and as an object of financial desire by the Marquez. She readily accepts subservience to a man she hates for the sake of a title and to please her father. Riefenstahl, who celebrated the patriarchy in Triumph, creates powerful allegories of male domination and abuse in Tiefland. The class differences between Martha, Donna Amelia, and the servant women are revealed as irrelevant under male oppression. The Marquez’s attempt to (re)possess Martha after the wedding is met with physical defense from Pedro. Having lost the duel with knives, the Marquez is blocked from escape by the peasants and Pedro strangles him as he did the wolf. Leaving the dead leader and the now free peasants behind, Martha and Pedro walk into the mountains and a new life together. Riefenstahl’s Martha rises blissfully into the happy ending be- cause the director/writer/actress who previously assembled visions of Hitler’s Germany to serve as a script for the regime’s self-image has, with Tiefland, scripted her own escape from a pact with evil and a prominence gone sour. Through Martha, she does not relinquish her equality with men but leaves behind a leader and a society she previously celebrated. Gone is the self-sacrificing, fascist-friendly mysticism of Das blaue Licht and the grandiose celebration of the documentary films. What surfaces is parody and criticism of such previous notions. Servitude imprisons Martha and the peasantry, who come to hate their ‘‘Führer.’’ Egomania and grandiosity offer these people nothing and ultimately destroy the elite. The very center of the story, the heroine, is a non-Aryan, a gypsy. What remains, even in the naive romantic finale, reaches beyond most postwar dominant film: a strong, independent female at odds with patriarchal roles and images, and a male devoid of machismo beyond his desire to defend. TIRE DIé FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1212 Perhaps because Riefenstahl’s Martha seems somewhat older than Pedro, he is also conscious of her dominant quality. Tiefland is Riefenstahl’s most personal cinematic statement, the result of a film oeuvre tied to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It implies a perception that Riefenstahl’s critics have failed to elicit from the filmmaker herself: namely that the warrior order she celebrated at Nuremberg would ultimately condemn her and those who would consider her post-Triumph films as a model. —Robert von Dassanowsky TIME OF THE GYPSIES See DOM ZA VESANJE THE TIN DRUM See BLECHTROMMEL TIRE DIé (Toss Me a Dime) Argentina, 1960 Director: Fernando Birri Production: Instituto de Cinematografia de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral; black and white, 16mm blown up to 35mm; running time: 33 minutes. Filmed 1958–1960 in Santa Fe, Argentina. Released 1960. Screenplay and photography: Fernando Birri and the students at the Instituto de Cinematografia of the Universidad Nacional de Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina; editor: Antonio Ripoll; sound: Mario Fezia; assistant director: Manuel Horacio Gimenez. Cast: Guillermo Cervantes Luro (Narrator); Voices of Francisco Petrone and Maria Rosa Gallo. Publications Books: Mahieu, Jose Agustin, Breve Historia del Cine Argentino, Buenos Aires, 1966. Micciche, Lino, editor, Fernando Birri e la Escuela Documental de Santa Fe, Pesaro, Italy, 1981. King, John, and Nissa Torrents, The Garden of Forking Paths: Argentine Cinema, London, 1988. Sendrós, Paraná, Fernando Birri, Buenos Aires, 1994. Articles: Pussi, Dolly, ‘‘Breve historia del documental en la Argentina,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), October 1973. Couselo, Jorge Miguel, ‘‘The Connection: 3 Essays on the Treatment of History in the Early Argentine Cinema,’’ in Journal of Latin American Lore, volume 1, no. 2, 1975. Burton, Julianne, interview with Fernando Birri in Fernando Birri e la Escuela Documental de Santa Fe, edited by Lino Micciche, Pesaro, Italy, 1981. Pereira, Manuel, ‘‘Carta a Fernando Birri,’’ and ‘‘Pequena critica agradecida a Tire die,’’ by Rigoberto Lopez, in Cinema Cubano (Havana), no. 100, 1981. Lombardi, Francisco, ‘‘Fernando Birri y las Raíces del Nuevo Cine Latino-americano,’’ in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), March 1984. Acker, Alison, ‘‘Pictures of the Other Americas: From Protest to Celebration,’’ in The Canadian Forum, vol. 66, December 1986. *** Though seldom seen, even in Latin America, Tire dié, a 33-minute documentary, is the most revered and influential of the hundreds of documentary shorts produced throughout the continent during the quarter century of the New Latin American Cinema movement. Most viewers know only the fragment presented in Fernando Solanas’ and Octavio Getino’s three-part feature documentary on Argentine poli- tics, The Hour of the Furnaces (1969), but the example of director Fernando Birri’s approach and philosophy can be detected in dozens of other films. In its genesis, mode of production and distribution, in its style and subject matter, in its successes and in its shortcomings, Tire dié blazed a trail that the entire New Latin American Cinema movement would continue to explore. The film begins with an aerial shot of the provincial city of Santa Fe, Argentina. A voice-of-God narrator (anonymous, omniscient) intones over these perspective-of-God images in a style reminiscent of traditional, authoritarian documentary. As conventional descrip- tive data (founding dates, population) give way to the less conven- tional (statistics concerning the number of streetlamps and hairdress- ers), the parodistic intent becomes clear. The neat grid of organized neighborhoods gives way to random shanties, as the narrator declares, ‘‘Upon reaching the edge of the city, statistics become uncertain. This is where, between four and five in the afternoon during 1956, 1957, and 1958, the first Latin American social survey film was shot.’’ The railroad bridge which the aerial camera surveys just prior to the credits is the site of the first post-credit sequence. From God’s vantage point, the camera has descended to the eye-level of the children who congregate there every afternoon. A little boy in a close- up stares directly at the camera, then turns and runs out of the frame. Other children appear in close-up, looking and speaking at the camera in direct address. Their barely audible voices are overlaid with the studied dramatic diction of two adult narrators, male and female, who repeat what the children are saying. This initial sequence ends as the camera follows one of the boys home and ‘‘introduces’’ his mother and then other members of the community. The primary expectation deferred and eventually fulfilled by the film’s intricate structuration is the arrival of the long and anxiously awaited train to Buenos Aires. The interviews in which local residents discuss their economic plight are repeatedly intercut with shots back to the tracks and the growing number of children keeping their restless TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1213 vigil there. The eventual climax of expectation (subjects’ and view- ers’) has the bravest and fleetest of the children running alongside the passing train. As they balance precariously on the narrow, elevated bridge, their hands straining upward to catch any coin the passengers might toss in their direction, children’s voices on the soundtrack chant hoarsely, ‘‘Tire dié! Tire dié!’’ (‘‘Toss me a dime!’’). The final shot holds on the solemn, soulful face of the three-year-old, protected by his mother’s embrace and her assertion that ‘‘he is too young to participate in the tire dié.’’ The first product of the first Latin American documentary film school, the Escuela Documental de Santa Fe founded by Birri in 1956, Tire dié was a collaborative effort the evolution and ethos of which recall the Italian neo-realism of the post-war years and anticipate certain aspects of the direct cinema of the 1960s. After selecting theme and locale from preliminary photo-reportages, Birri divided 60 students into various groups, each of which was to concentrate on a particular inhabitant of the riverside squatters’ community under study. With their single camera and cumbersome tape recorder, the group made daily visits during a two-year period to the marginal community where the film was set. All the residents of the riverside squatters’ camp attended the film’s premiere along with municipal and university dignitaries. In response to consultations with the film’s subjects and general audience questionnaires, the original 59-minute version was edited down to 33. A primitive mobile cinema kept the film circulating throughout the region. Tire dié exemplifies the attempt to democratize the documentary form by giving voice and image to sectors of a culture which had previously been ignored and suppressed. Given the film’s obvious commitment to direct visual and verbal address, the intervention of the anonymous male and female mediator/narrators is unexpected and disconcerting. Investigation into the film’s mode of production re- veals that this expedient derives not from prior design but from deficiencies in the original sound recording. Tire dié sought to give the effect of synchronous sound without the technical facilities to do so. The over-dubbing of social actors by professional actors is the central—but not the sole—contradiction of this social document: it brands a seminal attempt to democratize documentary discourse with the unwanted but unavoidable stamp of residual authoritarian ano- nymity, just as the intricate patterns of editing call assumptions of transparent realism into question. In its contradictions, as well as in its achievements, Tire dié stands as a landmark of Latin American social documentary. —Julianne Burton TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE (Shoot the Piano Player) France, 1960 Director: Fran?ois Truffaut Production: Films de la Plé?ade; black and white, 35mm, in Dyaliscope; running time: 80 minutes, English versions variously noted at 84 and 92 minutes. Released 22 August 1960, Paris. Filmed 1 December 1959–15 January 1960, additional shooting in March 1960. Filmed in Paris at a café and at Rue Mussard, also in Levallois and Le Sappey, France. Producer: Pierre Braunberger; screenplay: Fran?ois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, from the novel Down There by David Goodis; photography: Raoul Coutard; editors: Claudine Bouché and Cécile Decugis; sound: Jacques Gallois; art director: Jacques Mely; mu- sic: Georges Delerue. Cast: Charles Aznavour (Charlie Kohler/Edouard Saroyan); Marie Dubois (Lèna); Nicole Berger (Michèle Mercier); Serge Devri (Plyne); Claude Mansard (Momo); Richard Kanayan (Fido); Albert Rémy (Chico); Jacques Aslanian (Richard); Daniel Boulanger (Ernest); Claude Heymann (Lars Schmeel); Alex Joffé (Passerby who helps Chico); Bobby Lapointe (Singer in café); Catherine Lutz (Mammy). Publications Script: Truffaut, Fran?ois, and Marcel Moussy, Tirez sur le pianiste, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1987. Books: Taylor, John Russell, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, New York, 1964. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Personal Style, New York, 1966. Petrie, Graham, The Cinema of Fran?ois Truffaut, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1970. Crisp, C. G., and Michael Walker, Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1971. Braudy, Leo, editor, Focus on Shoot the Piano Player, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Crisp, C. G., Fran?ois Truffaut, London, 1972. Fanne, Dominique, L’Univers de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1972. Allen, Don, Truffaut, London, 1973; as Finally Truffaut, 1985. Monaco, James, The New Wave, New York, 1976. Collet, Jean, Le Cinéma de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1977. Insdorf, Annette, Fran?ois Truffaut, Boston, 1978. Walz, Eugene P., Fran?ois Truffaut: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Winkler, Willi, Die Filme von Fran?ois Truffaut, Munich, 1984. Bergala, Alain, and others, Le Roman de Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1985. Collet, Jean, Fran?ois Truffaut, Paris, 1985. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Truffaut par Truffaut, edited by Dominique Rabourdin, Paris, 1985. De Fornari, Oreste, I Filme di Fran?ois Truffaut, Rome, 1986. Dalmais, Hervé, Truffaut, Paris, 1987. Brunette, Peter, editor, Shoot the Piano Player: Fran?ois Truffaut, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1993. Insdorf, Annette, Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1995. Holmes, Fran?ois Truffaut, New York, 1998. Toubiana, Serge, and Antoine De Baecque, Truffaut, New York, 1999. Jacob, Gilles, Fran?ois Truffaut: Correspondence 1945–1984, Lanham, 2000. TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1214 Tirez sur le pianiste Articles: Baby, Yvonne, in Le Monde (Paris), 24 November 1960. Kas, Pierre, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1961. Martin, Marcel, in Cinéma (Paris), January 1961. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), February 1961. Torok, Jean-Paul, ‘‘The Point Sensible,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1961. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Uncommitted Artist?,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1961. Rhode, Gabriel and Eric, ‘‘Cinema of Appearance,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1961. Kauffmann, Stanley, in New Republic (New York), 9 July 1962. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 24 July 1962. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 26 July 1962. Cukier, Dan A., and Jo Gryn, ‘‘Entretien avec Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in Script (Paris), April 1962. Kael, Pauline, in Film Culture (New York), Winter 1962–63. Collet, Jean, and others, ‘‘Entretien Avec Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1962. Shatnoff, Judith, ‘‘Fran?ois Truffaut: The Anarchist Imagination,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1963. Klein, Michael, ‘‘The Literary Sophistication of Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965. ‘‘Hommage à Truffaut à Annency,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1967. Comolli, Jean-Louis, ‘‘Au Coeur des paradoxes,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1967. Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni, ‘‘Entretien avec Fran?ois Truffaut,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1967. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Chabrol and Truffaut,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1969–70. Bordwell, David, ‘‘A Man Can Serve Two Masters,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1971. Simsolo, No?l, in Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Thiher, A., ‘‘The Existential Play in Truffaut’s Early Films,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Summer 1977. Dudley, Don, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 2 March 1978. Chion, M., ‘‘Un Film meteore,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1982. Latil le Dantix, M., in Cinématographe (Paris), March 1982. Blanchet, C., ‘‘Tirez sur le pianiste: Le Second degré du cinéma,’’ in Cinema (Paris), May 1982. Marias, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), February 1984. TITANICFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1215 Gillain, A., ‘‘La scène de l’audition,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 362–363, July-August 1987. Guérif, Fran?ois, ‘‘Fran?ois Truffaut et la série noire,’’ in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 362–363, July-August 1987. Crowdus, Gary, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 18, no. 1, 1990. Davis, H.L., ‘‘Reminiscing About Shoot the Piano Player,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 19, no. 4, 1993. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘A Poet of Darkness, Who Longs for the Light,’’ in The New York Times, 16 May 1999. *** Fran?ois Truffaut’s astonishing success in his debut, The 400 Blows, was unpredictable, but that film does follow in the tradition of autobiographical first works by young and terribly sincere artists. As Truffaut himself recognized, the second work is the real test, and for his test he chose a subject and a style utterly opposed to that of 400 Blows. Shoot the Piano Player is distant from Truffaut’s personal life, distant some would say from life in general; it is as much as possible a filmmaker’s film. Drawn from a standard detective novel called Down There by David Goodis, the film played with the conventions of the genre and with the stylistic possibilities of the medium. Thought to be too recherché, it received no American distribution until after the success of Jules and Jim (1961), but since then it has become prized by many people as Truffaut’s most inventive work. It was Truffaut’s plan to inject life into contemporary French cinema first by emulating the American cinema (hence, the gangster genre) and then by gleefully upsetting the conventions and good taste that in his view had rigidified the movies in his country. He began with casting, purposefully giving the central role to the timid and introspective Charles Aznavour. Aznavour, already a suc- cessful singer, was not without screen experience: Truffaut had admired him in Franju’s Tête contre les murs. No one would have suspected that he could play Charlie Kohler, alias Edouard Saroyan, a concert pianist turned honky-tonk loser, especially when cast alongside typical tough guy characters. Truffaut exploited the contra- dictions by making the subject of timidity central to the film and treating it as it had never been treated in the movies before. His chief gangsters came right out of the cartoon strips. Their tight-lipped argot is interrupted by long disquisitions about female sexuality and the unforgettable throwaway anecdote about a steel- fabric necktie. Truffaut embedded countless jokes and citations within his tale. Lars Schmeel, the lecherous impresario, is named for Lars Schimdt, the man who took Ingrid Bergman away from Rossellini, one of Truffaut’s friends and heroes. Chico, Charlie’s older brother, is named after Chico Marx. But far more than placing disruptive elements within a conventional story, Truffaut went out of his way to find a new way to tell such a story, to tell in fact a new kind of story. In its first sequence Shoot the Piano Player announces the indirection of its method. Chico, chased down a dark street by an unseen car, runs into a lightpost and is knocked out. The first incongruity (crashing into the only bright object around) is replaced by a second as he is helped to his feet by a passerby. The chase is forgotten in a lengthy conversation about sexual fidelity and the joys of marriage. We will never see this ‘‘extra’’ again, but he has set the film on its way, interrupting its suspense with a tale about tenderness and love. The film as a whole proceeds in just this way: overly serious speeches (and even voice-overs) are cut short by ridiculous sub- actions (Clarisse tempting a client; the poor mug who owns the bar getting chummy with Charlie as he tries to choke him to death). Visually, as Roger Greenspun has noted, the film alternates blacks and whites like the keyboard, which is its central image. Gangsters are funny, the heroine tells dirty jokes, milk poured on the car obscures the vision of the driver, snow on the windshield is alternately black or white depending on the sun’s position. The changes of mood that punctuate the story are actually central to its structure, for in the middle of this comic melodrama, an interior flashback gives us the tragic tale of Edouard’s rise to fame and the suicide of his wife. Life itself is shown to be full of impossible shifts in fortune and feeling. It is all one big joke. By the film’s end Truffaut succeeds in bringing poignancy to the most trite of love stories through the incongruous juxtapositions of his style. Fame, obscurity, suicide, love, murder, robbery, and a whole family saga are woven together in 85 minutes under the routine theme song Charlie plays in the bar. Life is seen to be bigger than any of its events, bigger than the bitter end to which it leads all of us. Truffaut doesn’t believe in his tale, but he does believe in the emotions it brings up and in the powers of cinema to evoke those emotions. In mixing genres and moods and in vigorously exploring powers of elliptical editing, fluid cinemascope, and lyrical music, Shoot the Piano Player exalts such power and remains a delight to watch. Beyond parody, its sincerity is the love Truffaut feels for the movies. That sincerity is infectious. —Dudley Andrew TITANIC USA, 1997 Director: James Cameron Production: 20 th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and Lightstorm Entertainment; Color (DeLuxe), 70mm; running time: 194 minutes; length: 5,426 m (10 reels). Released 19 December 1997. Filmed July 1996—March 1997 at Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Belmont Olympic Pool, Long Beach, California; and Titanic wreck, sea bed, North Atlantic. Cost: $200 million. Producers: James Cameron and Jon Landau; co-producers: Al Giddings, Grant Hill, and Sharon Mann; executive producer: Rae Sanchini; associate producer: Pamela Easley; screenplay: James Cameron; cinematography: Russell Carpenter; editors: Conrad Buff IV, James Cameron, and Richard A. Harris; sound: Tom Johnson, Gary Rydstrom, Gary Summers, and Mark Ulano; produc- tion designer: Peter Lamont; art direction: Martin Laing and Bill Rea; set decoration: Michael Ford; original musical score: James Horner; special effects: Digital Domain; makeup: Greg Cannom, Tina Earnshaw, and Simon Thompson; costume designer: Deborah Lynn Scott; casting: Suzanne Crowley, Mali Finn, and Gilly Poole. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson); Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater); Billy Zane (Caledon ‘‘Cal’’ Hockley); Kathy Bates (Molly Brown); Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater); Gloria Stuart (Rose Dawson Calvert); Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett); Bernard Hill (Captain Edward John Smith); David Warner (Spicer Lovejoy); Victor Garber TITANIC FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1216 Titanic (Thomas Andrews); Jonathan Hyde (J. Bruce Ismay); Suzy Amis (Lizzy Calvert); Lewis Abernathy (Lewis Bodine); Nicholas Cascone (Bobby Buell); Dr. Anatoly M. Sagalevitch (Anatoly Milkailavich); Danny Nucci (Fabrizio De Rossi); Jason Barry (Tommy Ryan); Ewan Stewart (First Officer William Murdoch); Ioan Gruffudd (First Offi- cer Harold Lowe); Jonathan Phillips (Second Officer Charles Lightoller); Mark Lindsay Chapman (Chief Officer Henry Wilde); Richard Graham (Quartermaster George Rowe); Paul Brightwell (Quartermaster Robert Hichens); Ron Donachie (Master at Arms); Eric Braeden (John Jacob Astor); Charlotte Chatton (Madeleine Astor); Bernard Fox (Col. Archibald Gracie); Michael Ensign (Ben- jamin Guggenheim); Fannie Brett (Madame Aubert, Mr. Guggenheim’s mistress); Jenette Goldstein (Irish Mommy); Camilla Overbye Roos (Helga Dahl); Linda Kerns (3rd Class Woman); Amy Gaipa (Trudy Bolt, Rose’s chambermaid); Jonathan Evans-Jones (Band Leader Wallace Henry Hartley); Mike Butters (Musician/Baker, uncredited); James Cameron (Brief cameo in steerage dance scene, uncredited). Awards: Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Production Design, 1997; Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Song, Best Sound, 1998; American Society of Cinematographers award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases, 1998; Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Cinematography, 1998; Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, 1998; Golden Globes for Best Director-Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture-Drama, Best Original Score-Motion Picture, Best Original Song-Motion Picture, 1998; PGA Golden Laurel Award for Motion Picture Producer of the Year, 1998; Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role (Stuart), Outstanding Performance by a Cast, 1998; Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, 1998; Grammy Award for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television, 1999; People’s Choice Awards for Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture and Favorite Motion Picture, 1999. Publications Scripts: Cameron, James. Titanic: A Film Treatment. Los Angeles, 25 March 1995. Cameron, James. Titanic: James Cameron’s Illustrated Screenplay, New York, 1999. TITANICFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1217 Books: Cameron, James, Ed W. Marsh, et. al., photography by Douglas Kirkland. James Cameron’s Titanic, New York, 1997. Cameron, James and Joseph Montebello. James Cameron’s Titanic Poster Book, New York, 1998. Parisi, Paula. Titanic and the Making of James Cameron: The Inside Story of the Three-Year Adventure that Rewrote Motion Picture History, Newmarket Press, 1998. Fritscher, Jack. Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot. Palm Drive Publishing, 1999. Sandler, Kevin S. and Gaylyn Studlar, editors. Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, Rutgers University Press, 1999. Articles: McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Titanic’’ (rev.), in Variety (New York), 3 Novem- ber 1997. Parisi, Paula, ‘‘Titanic: Man Overboard,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (New York), 7 November 1997. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Titanic’’ (rev.), in Time (New York), 8 Decem- ber 1997. Masters, Kim. ‘‘Trying to Stay Afloat,’’ in Time (New York), 8 December 1997. Brown, Corie and David Ansen, ‘‘Rough Waters: The Filming of Titanic,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 15 December, 1997. Glieberman, Owen, ‘‘Titanic’’ (rev.), in Entertainment Weekly (New York), 19 December 1997. Calhoun, James, ‘‘That Sinking Feeling,’’ in Theater Crafts Interna- tional, January 1998. Robertson, Barbara, ‘‘The Grand Illusion,’’ in Computer Graphics World, January 1998. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘Titanic Earns Its Sea Legs,’’ in New York Daily News, 6 February 1998. Gehring, Wes D., ‘‘Titanic: The Ultimate Epic,’’ in USA Today Magazine (New York), March 1998. Klady, Leonard, ‘‘Epics Titanic and Wind Crush Formulas,’’ in Variety (New York), 2 March 1998. Ansen, David, ‘‘The Court of King Jim,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 13 April 1998. LoPiccolo, Phil, ‘‘The Secret of Titanic’s Success,’’ in Computer Graphics World, May 1998. Chagollan, Steve, ‘‘Reversal of Fortune,’’ in Variety (New York), 14 December 1998. Pence, Mike, ‘‘Explaining the Appeal of Titanic,’’ in Saturday Evening Post, May 1999. Chumo, Peter N., II, ‘‘Learning to Make Each Day Count: Time in James Cameron’s Titanic,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Winter 1999. *** That James Cameron would make Titanic was inevitable, since the director of such blockbusters as Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies once likened filmmaking to creating ‘‘spectacles,’’ and what specta- cle has proven costlier, grander, or more popular than Titanic? It is also appropriate that the current stage of Cameron’s career has been capped by the biggest cinematic spectacle he (or anyone else for that matter) has yet created. Indeed, the film (as of late 1998) has brought in an overwhelming worldwide box office of $1.8 billion (a total that grows exponentially when added with a $30 million television sale, $400 million for the over 25 million copies of the soundtrack that have been sold; and an expected $700 million in global video sales when all is said and done). The unequaled box-office success this film has enjoyed in addition to the critical praise that has been heaped upon it (it tied All About Eve with a record 14 Academy Award nominations and consequently went on to win a record 11 including Best Picture and Best Director—tying Ben-Hur) has transformed Titanic into something more than a mere movie, it has become a cultural phenomenon. The production story of Titanic (an epic on par with the film itself) began when Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage of the ship in 1985 on the ocean floor 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Upon seeing the National Geographic documentary on the discovery, Cameron developed the following story idea: ‘‘Do story with bookends of present-day [wreckage] scene…intercut with memory of a survi- vor…needs a mystery or driving plot element.’’ Then, in early 1995, Cameron made the initial pitch to studio executives. A pitch which was reluctantly accepted based on the director’s track record of profitability as well as the fact that he was maintaining that the film could be made for less than $100 million. In late 1995, as a precursor to the start of formal production, Cameron made 12 two-and-a-half mile descents to the Titanic wreckage site where he used a specifically designed 35mm camera to obtain footage for the bookend sections of the film. Armed with this footage, Cameron next had to convince the studio to back the film wholeheartedly. After the project was offi- cially greenlighted in May 1996, ground was broken on a studio in Rosarito Beach in Baja California, since it had been determined some months prior that no one studio in the world could provide the facilities needed for the mammoth project. This custom-built studio featured a 17-million gallon exterior shooting tank (the largest in the world) which housed the 775 foot-long, 90% to scale replica of the Titanic; a five-million gallon interior tank housed on a 32,000 sq. ft. soundstage; three other stages; production offices; set/prop storage; a grip/electric building; welding/fabrication workshops; dressing rooms; and support structures. During this time, Fox was seeking a partnership with other studios to alleviate the film’s already considerable financial risk. After pitching the deal to a few studios, Paramount agreed to co-finance the film (but they would ultimately limit their contribution to $65 million). Production on the film finally began in September 1996. Soon after the start of production, rumors were circulating regarding the expensive production, which would eventually jump from 138 to 160 days; the less-than-stellar working conditions some crew members likened to sweatshops (some even complained of having to work as long as two weeks without a break); unconfirmed accidents on the set; an infamous food-poisoning inci- dent when the cast and crew were accidentally served food laced with PCP; as well as the usual screaming tirades from the compulsive director. Cameron and company also went to great lengths to ensure the historical authenticity of the film. It is through these technical aspects (i.e. the set decoration, costumes, etc.) that the film excels on an epic scale. When production finally wrapped in March 1997, over 12 days (288 hours) of footage had been shot. As Cameron secluded himself in the editing room, 18 special effects houses went to work on the more than 500 visual effects shots that the film would eventually require (a process that would take them the next several months to complete). Originally slated to open on 2 July, Titanic was pushed to December when it became clear that Cameron was nowhere near being done with the arduous editing process. When all was said and done, Titanic was released on 19 December in an attempt to maximize TITANIC FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1218 it’s Oscar chances. The total shooting cost for the film was estimated at just over $200 million. Titanic tells the fictional story of two class-crossed lovers who meet aboard the disaster-bound ship, fall in love, and then struggle to survive the grizzly sinking all within the context of a true-to-detail retelling of the actual disaster. This story within the film is launched from the present-day via a subplot that revolves around a missing diamond (the completely made-up ‘‘Heart of the Ocean’’). After treasure-hunter-for-hire Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) finds a drawing of a naked young woman wearing the elusive diamond and features it in a television program on which he is appearing, an elderly woman (Gloria Stuart as a 101-year-old Rose) comes forward claiming to be the woman in the picture. After being whisked to the Titanic wreck site, Rose proceeds to recount the story of Titanic’s fateful voyage. It is here that a slew of stock characters are introduced: Jack Dawson (DiCaprio) is the American, free-spirit archetype from the wrong side of the tracks; Rose DeWitt Bukater (Winslet) a beautiful Philadelphia socialite who has no control over the course of her life; ‘‘Cal’’ Hockley (Zane), Rose’s oppressive husband-to-be who sees her as nothing more than a possession; and Rose’s domineering mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Fisher) who views Rose’s marriage to Cal as vital to the family’s survival and Rose’s burgeoning romance with Jack as a threat to her current way of life. The romance between Jack and Rose begins when he thwarts her attempted suicide and infiltrates her first-class lifestyle. Slowly, Jack entices Rose to let go and to, as the film ensures we remember, ‘‘make it count.’’ Their relationship culminates in the creation of the aforementioned drawing and a torrid bit of lovemaking. Titanic then hits the iceberg and the film shifts from romance to an action-adventure. The final act of the film concentrates on the sinking of the ship and Rose and Jack’s quest for survival. After some of the greatest special effects ever put on film, Titanic sinks and Rose is left atop a piece of wood while Jack floats nearby slowly freezing to death. While they wait for rescue, Jack makes Rose promise that she ‘‘won’t give up, no matter what happens, no matter how hopeless.’’ After being rescued and reaching America, Rose takes the name of Dawson and lives the life that she promised the deceased Jack she would. The film then bounces back to the present day salvage ship to deliver the film’s coda, wherein Lovett declares that although he’s been searching for Titanic he never ‘‘got it.’’ Later that evening, Rose makes her way to the deck of the ship and drops the ‘‘Heart of the Ocean’’ necklace into the sea. Rose dies peacefully in her sleep (‘‘an old lady warm in her bed,’’ as Jack had predicted) later that night surrounded by the photographic memories of the life she had thanks to Jack. Upon her death, she is transported back to Titanic (presumably her entrance to the afterlife) and reunited with Jack, as well as all of those who died aboard the ship, at the grand staircase (where the clock reads 2:20-the time of Titanic’s sinking). She appears in this sequence as her 17-year-old self, thus suggesting that this is, as Dave Kehr suggests in the New York Daily News, ‘‘the time it will always be: [both] the beginning of her life and its end.’’ Before addressing the critical worth of Titanic, it is important to discuss the nature of its immense popularity. Perhaps the weakest explanation for Titanic’s popularity would lie in an offhand comment by Cameron himself wherein he referred to the film as nothing more than a ‘‘$190 million chick flick.’’ Although it is true that scores of women (mostly teenage girls) flocked to see this movie less for the special effects or sensational movie making than for the charismatic DiCaprio and the way he swept Winslet off her feet, to categorize the entire film as a so-called ‘‘chick-flick’’ does it a disservice. Instead, the appeal of Titanic exists in the relationship the audience has with the story of the film itself. That is, the film functions almost as a parable for the American Dream and the American way of life. The core of the film is an epic romance. Cameron has long said that this was the ‘‘great love story’’ he thought The Abyss should have been. While the love story appears to be the heart of the film it is, however, the anachronistic characters of Jack and Rose that make the film so appealing to today’s audiences. These two characters serve, as Peter N. Chum has noted, as the ‘‘audience’s surrogates.’’ That is, neither character is really correct for the time period of the film, they are more like modern interpretations of a princess and a young rogue. Yet they are more than mere stereotypes. Both characters are archetypes of the American consciousness: Rose being the enlightened woman of the 20 th century and Jack being the adventurous American. The way these modern characters function within the time-frame of the film is what endears them to the audience and is also what makes the film more a lesson in morality that a retelling of history. It is for this reason, as Mike Pence has pointed out, that ‘‘what draws us to this film is an undeniable sense that we are seeing America of the late 20 th century in metaphor before our eyes.’’ The critical reception Titanic received was for the most part positive, but there was a faction that detested the film and it is this that causes the film’s critical worth to be in question even today after all of its success and accolades. Much of the post-Oscar lambasting of Titanic can be traced to the backlash over the snub of L.A. Confiden- tial in favor of Titanic in the categories of Best Picture and Director. The general opinion was that Oscars voters felt that if they didn’t go along with the popular opinion then they would be subject to profound criticism. So, when the big box-office winner also won the two biggest awards, the assumption was that the Academy had been taken in by the hype and had been pathetically swayed by public sentiment. But, this is a very close-minded argument when one considers for a moment that Titanic was actually a good movie. Curtis Hanson (the director of L.A. Confidential) elaborated on this very point when he stated, ‘‘As Frank Capra said, don’t make your best movie the year somebody else makes Gone With the Wind.’’ Does this mean that Gone With the Wind shouldn’t have won Best Picture because Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (released that same year) had a better story, better characters, or even better acting, yet was considerably less popular than it’s competitor? Each film exists on it’s own terms and each is a fine piece of cinema in its own right. The inability to come to terms with this undeniable fact is the cause of division among critics and film scholars on the subject of Titanic. This does not mean that Titanic is free of flaws. One thing that stands out as sub par is the crude often inelegant dialogue of the script. (A problem that has plagued Cameron in all of his films, but has gone relatively unnoticed until he decided to do a period specific romantic epic in which his writing style is not a comfortable fit). As Brown and Ansen suggest in Newsweek, ‘‘Cameron should have lavished more of his perfection- ist’s zeal on his dialogue.’’ Logically speaking, several script prob- lems exist within Titanic besides dialogue. For example, if the story is being related to us by Rose, how can she know anything about Jack before having met him during her attempted suicide (are his actions embellished by her to befit her memory of him?). Also of note are other instances wherein Rose recounts dialogue and actions she could have had no knowledge of (i.e. the framing of Jack by Cal or the decision by J. Bruce Ismay to push the engines as hard as they could go). Although it can be argued that the acting throughout the film is at times wooden and merely meant to bring life to what amounts to simply stock characters (DiCaprio’s Jack, throughout the first half of TODO SOBRE MI MADREFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1219 the film, stands out in this regard) none of these characters become, as Richard Corliss has accused them of being, ‘‘caricatures…designed only to illustrate a predictable prejudice: that the first-class passen- gers are third-class people, and vice versa.’’ These so-called carica- tures never work against the audience forcing a dislike of the film on the grounds of insulting their intelligence. Consider this: Titanic achieved the level of popularity it did without the help of a single international box-office star (although it certainly created one in DiCaprio). Certainly this must attest to the entertaining value of the film. One thing that cannot be disputed is that once Titanic hits the iceberg 100 or so minutes into the film, the next 80 minutes are as thrilling as any action adventure film to date (and is definitely where Cameron shines). When combined with the romantic epic nature of the film, Titanic, as Owen Glieberman has stated, ‘‘floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.’’ All this is not to say that Titanic is a work of art, it has its problems. It is poorly written (please note that it was not nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay) and is at times rather shabbily acted (but hasn’t somebody made that same argument about Gone With the Wind at some point in history?). (Certainly Cameron didn’t help his own critical standing when he blasted Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times in print for writing an unflattering review of Titanic.) But, where the film does succeed is in being a flat out good movie. It is enjoyable, pure and simple. Surely, nobody can doubt that Titanic is the most successful film in history, and no one can dispute that the film boasts some of the most spectacular effects ever put on film (in fact, apart from Best Picture and Director, all of the Oscars that Titanic won had something to do with the film’s technical accom- plishments). But, does all of this mean that it deserved to win Best Picture and Director over L.A. Confidential? That’s a matter of opinion and endless debate. Perhaps 60 years down the road we will have a completely different consensus regarding Titanic than the argumentative one we have today. —Michael J. Tyrkus TO LIVE See IKIRU TODO SOBRE MI MADRE (All About My Mother) Spain/France, 1999 Director: Pedro Almodóvar Production: El Deseo S.A., France 2 Cinéma, Renn Productions, Via Digital; color, 35mm, Panavision; sound: Dolby Digital; running time: 105 minutes. Released 8 April 1999 in Spain; filmed in Barcelona, Madrid, and A Coru?a, Spain. Producer: Agustín Almodóvar; screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar; cinematographer: Affonso Beato; editor: José; Salcedo; music: Alberto Iglesias; production design: Antxón Gómez; art direction: Antxón Gómez; costume design: Sabine Daigeler; José María De Cossio. Cast: Cecilia Roth (Manuela); Marisa Parédes (Huma Rojo); Penélope Cruz (Sister Rosa); Candela Pe?a (Nina); Antonia San Juan (Agrado); Eloy Azorín (Esteban); Rosa María Sardà (Rosa’s Mother); Toni Cantó (Lola); Fernando Fernán Gómez (Rosa’s Father); Carlos Lozano (Mario); Fernando Guillén (Doctor in ‘‘Streetcar Named Desire’’); Juan José Otegui (Ginecólogo); Manuel Morón; José Luis Torrijo. Publications: Books: Bouza Vidal, Nuria, The Films of Pedro Almodovar, translated by Linda Moore and Victoria Hughes, Madrid, 1988. Smith, Paul Julian, García Lorca/Almodóvar: Gender, Nationality, and the Limits of the Visible, Cambridge, 1995. Vernon, Kathleen M., and Barbara Morris, editors, Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, Westport, 1995. Allinson, Mark, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, London, 2000. Smith, Paul J., Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar, New York, 2000. Articles: Menard, Valerie, ‘‘El Conquistador Del Cine: Provocative Filmmaker Pedro Almódovar Explores the Human Experience,’’ in Hispanic, vol. 11, no. 5, May 1998. Holland, Jonathan, in Variety (New York), vol. 354, no. 9, 19 April 1999. Smith, Paul Julian, and José Arroyo, ‘‘Silicone and Sentiment: All About My Mother,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 9, no. 9, September 1999. ‘‘A Man of Many Women,’’ an interview with Jonathan Van Meter, in New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1999. Lemon, Brendan, ‘‘A Man Fascinated by Women, as Actresses,’’ in New York Times, 19 September 1999. Ressner, Jeffrey, ‘‘Loving Pedro: Almódovar, the Naughty Boy of Spanish Cinema, Pays Warm Tribute to Strong Women and Produces the Most Satisfying Work of His Career with All About My Mother,’’ in Time (New York), vol. 154, no. 20, 15 Novem- ber 1999. Cortina, Betty, ‘‘On the Verge: Pedro Almódovar Gets Big Raves with All About My Mother: And He May Just Go Hollywood,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, no. 513, 19 November 1999. ‘‘The Best of Cinema of 1999,’’ in Time (New York), vol. 154, no. 25, 20 December 1999. *** Women have almost always been at the center of the Almodóvar universe, and that is more than ever true in Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother). His 1999 film is explicitly dedicated to women and actresses, and particularly to actresses who have played actresses in such great films as All About Eve. That film, and Tennessee TOKYO MONOGATARI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1220 William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, are the primary influences on the director’s latest work, but his story transcends even its influences. Cecilia Roth plays Manuela, who once was an actress but now supports herself and her seventeen-year-old son with her work as a nurse in an agency that facilitates the donation and transplantation of human organs. We actually first meet her as she is playing the part in a training film for her organization of a woman who must decide amidst the grief of the sudden death of a family member whether or not to allow the transplantation of heart and liver to someone in need. Manuela’s son Esteban (Eloy Azorín) will be celebrating his birthday in a day or two, and would like nothing better from his mother than for her to tell him all about his father. Manuela recog- nizes that Esteban has nearly grown up, and that she can not rightly withhold this information from him any longer. But first they are going to see a performance of Streetcar, with the central role of Blanche played by a great actress named Huma Rojos. Marisa Parédes, who brought both Tacones lejanos (High Heels) and La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) to vibrant life, seems the only possible choice for the role of Huma (which means ‘‘smoke’’). After the performance, Manuela and Esteban wait in the rain to get an autograph from Huma, but she is engrossed in an argument with Nina, her heroin-addicted lover who plays Stella in the same produc- tion, and they disregard the boy who bangs on their window as they continue fighting. He runs after their car in the rain, and the chance of a moment transforms his mother from a nurse into a grieving parent who must make the same choices she has helped so many oth- ers to make. All this takes place in the first ten minutes of the film, and the plot and characterizations develop ever more richly as the story pro- gresses. After disposing of her son’s heart, Manuela takes a train from Madrid to Barcelona, reversing a trip she had made eighteen years earlier, running away from the Esteban who was the father of her unborn child, and who was in the process of becoming Lola. This marks Almodóvar’s first significant foray out of Madrid, which has been the location of his twelve previous feature films. In Barcelona, Manuela comes again into the orbit of Huma and Nina, and also becomes reacquainted with an old friend, Agrado, another male-to-female transsexual who has not quite completed all the surgery of her transformation. At the same time she meets a young nun, Sister Rosa, who tries to be a nurse to people like Agrado who support their tangential existences with prostitution and drug dealing, but will soon be in need of nursing. No matter where Manuela runs to, she cannot run away from her work. Richard Corliss in his lovely, perceptive Time review says that ‘‘[Manuela] . . . is the ultimate organ donor. Now that her heart has been broken, she gives pieces of it to everyone.’’ These characters revolve around each other in ways that are sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes antagonistic, and mostly have the archetypal importance of characters from a story by Garcia Lorca. They deal with all of the issues of birth and life and death, sometimes as actresses, sometimes as working women, and some- times in a blend of these roles that cannot be separated out. Penélope Cruz and Candela Pe?a deliver wonderfully affecting performances as Sister Rosa and Nina. Nevertheless, with both of these wonderful performances, not to mention those of Parédes and of Antonia San Juan as Agrado, it is Cecilia Roth in the central role of Manuela who truly astonishes us with her mastery. She establishes her love of her son so compellingly that you cannot imagine how she can live after he dies. And then she shows you how she can live, and help other people to live as they deal with their own tragedies. As tragic as some elements of Todo sobre mi madre can be, and as much as death and AIDS play a central part in the development of the plot, this is not a movie that overwhelms its audience in sadness. Many glints of the old Almodóvar humor shine through, particularly in a spur-of-the-moment monologue delivered by Agrado when Huma and Nina cannot go on in ‘‘Streetcar’’ one evening. Agrado regales the remaining audience with the story of her life, climaxing with the affirmation that ‘‘it cost me a lot to be authentic. . . Because a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself.’’ This comic affirmation reinforces the more serious affirmation of the story—that life goes on even when faced with the inevitability of death, and that life is enriched more by helping each other in the living than in trying to go it alone. Almodóvar’s community of women and actresses and children of all ages do just that, and have to be granted some kind of cinematic immortality for the beautifully simple way that they imprint themselves on our hearts. While many critics agree with Corliss that Todo sobre mi madre is ‘‘the most satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career,’’ others cannot seem to adjust to an Almodóvar who does not continue to crank out the no-holds-barred satire with which he first introduced himself to international audiences. Roger Ebert foregrounds the elements of this old Almodóvar in his reliably mainstream, middle-brow review, but acknowledges that the ‘‘characters have taken on a weight and reality, as if Almodóvar has finally taken pity on them. . . ’’ Stanley Kauffmann starts off his review praising the old Almodóvar (‘‘When he began his career . . . he seemed to burst forth, with satire ablaze, to revenge himself . . . on the oppressive stupidities and hypocrisies of society.’’) But in Todo sobre mi madre, Kauffmann finds ‘‘. . . no discernable theme: its purpose is to surprise us with non-soap incidents in a soap opera about women.’’ B. W. Ife, however, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, demonstrates that critics can break out of the mold of prior expecta- tions. While he found Almodóvar’s two previous films, La flor de mi secreto and Carne tremulo (Live Flesh) to possess ‘‘. . . a sense of compromise, of maturity achieved at the cost of a slight dulling of the edge,’’ he can still see that with his latest feature the director has ‘‘found his true voice and written an intricate, insightful screenplay which allows it to be heard to full advantage.’’ —Stephen Brophy TOKYO MONOGATARI (Tokyo Story) Japan, 1953 Director: Yasujiro Ozu Production: Shochiku/Ofuna; color, 35mm; running time: 136 min- utes; length: 12,509 feet. Released 3 November 1953, Tokyo. Producer: Takeshi Yamamoto; screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Nada; photography: Yuhara Atsuta; editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura; sound: Yoshisaburo Sueo; production designers: Tatsuo Hamada TOKYO MONOGATARIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1221 Tokyo monogatari with Itsuo Takahashi; music: Takanobu Saito; costume designer: Taizo Saito. Cast: Chishu Ryu (Father); Chieko Higashiyama (Mother); So Yamamura (Koichi); Haruko Sugimura (Shige Kaneko); Setsuko Hara (Noriko); Kyoko Kagawa (Kyoko); Shiro Osaka (Keizo); Eijiro Tono (Sanpei Numata); Kuniko Miyake (Fumiko); Nobuo Nakamura (Kurazo Kaneko); Teruko Nagaoka (Yone Hattori); Zen Murase (Minoru); Mitsuhiro Mori (Isamu); Hisao Toake (Osamu Hattori); Toyoko Takahashi (Shukichi Hirayama’s neighbor); Mutsuko Sakura (Patron of the Oden restaurant); Toru Abe (Railroad employee); Sachiko Mitani (Noriko’s neighbor). Publications Script: Ozu, Yasujiro, and Kogo Nada, Tokyo Story, edited by Donald Richie and Eric Klestadt, in Contemporary Japanese Literature, edited by Howard Hibbett, New York, 1977. Books: Richie, Donald, and Joseph Anderson, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Rutland, Vermont, 1960; revised edition, Princeton, 1982. Richie, Donald, Five Pictures of Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo, 1962. Richie, Donald, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Charac- ter, New York, 1971. Satomi, Jun, Tomo Shimogawara, and Shizo Yamauchi, editors, Ozu—Hito to Shigoto (Ozu—The Man and His Work), Tokyo, 1972. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style in Film, Berkeley, 1972, 1988. Burch, No?l, Theory of Film Practice, New York, 1973. Richie, Donald, Ozu, Berkeley, 1974. Schrader, Leonard, and Haruji Nakamura, editors, Masters of Japa- nese Cinema, New York, 1974. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Burch, No?l, To the Distant Observer, Berkeley, 1979. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. TOKYO MONOGATARI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1222 Bordwell, David, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Princeton and London, 1988. Desser, David, editor, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Cambridge, 1997. Articles: Miner, Earl, in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1956. Anderson, Lindsay, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1957–58. Ryu, Chishu, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1964. Hatch, Robert, ‘‘The Family of Ozu,’’ in Nation (New York), 22 June 1964. Wood, Robin, in Movie (London), Summer 1965. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), July 1965. Farber, Manny, ‘‘Ozu,’’ in Artforum (New York), June 1970. ‘‘Ozu on Ozu,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), Summer 1970. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu: A Biographical Filmography,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1971. Menon, N. S., in Take One (Montreal), May-June 1971. Tessier, Max, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma (Paris), July-October 1971. Kauffman, Stanley, in New Republic (New York), 18 March 1972. Menon, N. S., in Take One (Montreal), July 1972. ‘‘Ozu on Ozu,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), Winter 1972–73. Coleman, Francis X.J., in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, New York, 1973. Bonnet, J., ‘‘A la decouverte d’Ozu,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1978. Martin, M., in Ecran (Paris), February 1978. Wood, Robin, in Positif (Paris), February 1978. ‘‘Tokyo Story Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 March 1978. Gauthier, G., in Image et Son (Paris), April 1978. Richie, Donald, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu,’’ in Cinema, a Critical Dictionary, London, 1980. Konshak, D. J., ‘‘Space and Narrative in Tokyo Story,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1980. Hosman, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), September 1980. Shipman, David, in Films and Filming (London), November 1983. ‘‘Tokyo Story Section’’ of Skrien (Amsterdam), Winter 1983–84. Berta, R., Interview with Yahara Atsuta, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1985. ‘‘Ozu, la vita e la geometria dei film,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), no. 151, 1991. Wood, R., ‘‘The ‘Noriko’ Trilogy,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Win- ter 1992. Zunzunegui, S., ‘‘El perfume del Zen,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), vol. 11, January 1993. Modern Review, vol. 1, no. 12, December-January 1993–1994. Berkes, Ildikó, ‘‘Tokiói t?rténet,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), vol. 30, no. 12, January 1994. Rayns, Tony, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 2, Febru- ary 1994. Aloff, Mindy, ‘‘How American Intellectuals Learned to Love Ozu,’’ in The New York Times, 3 April 1994. Télérama (Paris), no. 2370, 14 June 1995. Nicholas, Gregor, ‘‘Slipper Shots,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 8, August 1997. *** Film historians have long singled out three major directorial talents from Japan: Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. And, at least in the West, and to almost as great a degree in his own nation, Tokyo Story stands for the best in Ozu’s nearly forty-year career, a superior example of a filmmaker at the height of his powers. The narrative of Tokyo Story seems straightforward and simple enough. An elderly couple, living by the sea in Onomichi in the south of Japan, go to visit their grown up children in Tokyo, but find they do not fit in. Their children (and grandchildren) have become mean and selfish, negatively effected by city living. The grandparents are only treated nicely by their widowed daughter-in-law, who despite having to live in poverty, has retained traditional values. The grandparents eventually return home, and the grandmother dies, leaving the grand- father to face the future alone. Tokyo Story hardly has a happy ending. By closing the drama with the daughter-in-law going off, leaving the grandfather by the now familiar port, we confront the often sad reality of everyday existence. Tokyo Story presents an all too common situation, a tale of real life which happens more often than we like to consider. The point is that while the Hollywood system would not permit such a tragic tale to make it to the screen the Japanese industry would. Most critics find Tokyo Story central to Ozu’s final period of filmmaking, the last great excursions of a virtuoso in a lengthy career in the Japanese cinema. During the 1950s, after Japan had emerged from the war, Ozu often dealt with traditional values. The ‘‘Tokyo’’ in the title was central to the life of the nation after 1880, presenting to the world how Meiji Japan could succeed in western arenas. By the 1920s Tokyo stood as one of the more populous cities in the world. Of Ozu’s fifty-four films, some forty-nine take place in Tokyo and five mention the city in their title. This city, more than any, symbolized the modern world, with its mass culture, including the ever growing obsession with motion pictures. In certain respects Tokyo Story is a typical work, but in many it is not. Although not all of Ozu’s films are about the family, certainly he was vitally interested in that part of Japanese life. He was, after the war, particularly intrigued with the changes his nation was undergo- ing. Although Ozu is most often seen as a traditionalist, he was always concerned with the events of everyday life. Tokyo Story is typical of late Ozu in that it arose from immediate concerns of the early 1950s, in particular Tokyo being rebuilt and families becoming more ‘‘urbanized.’’ Tokyo Story illustrates the structural rigor and richness of the later Ozu films. This is true for editing, camerawork, mise-en-scène, and sound. For example, three recurring sounds define the acoustic texture of the film: chugging boats, the noises of trains, and the sounds of cicadas. All three are established in the film’s initial scene when the grandparents prepare to leave Onomichi. Their stay in Tokyo is then constantly punctuated by train whistles. Later when the grandmother is about to die the scene opens with train sounds and closes with the noises of harbor boats. In the West Ozu is celebrated as an artist. But in the Japanese film industry he was seen as a steady worker. He created, on schedule, one film a year for the massive Shochiku studio. He was that studio’s most famous director, and films such as Tokyo Story kept profits flowing in the years before television would become a rival for the mass entertainment audience. And he was honored in industry polls. Tokyo Story won the ‘‘Kinema Jumpo’’ first place for the best film of the year in Japan. Although Tokyo Story was released in Japan in November, 1953, and was a popular success there, it did not make its impact in the West TOM JONESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1223 until nearly two decades later upon its release in the United States in 1972. But today critics around the world list it among the greatest films ever to be created in the nearly one hundred years of world cinema. —Douglas Gomery TOM JONES UK, 1963 Director: Tony Richardson Production: Woodfall; Eastmancolor; running time: 128 minutes; length: 11,565 feet. Released 1963. Producer: Tony Richardson; screenplay: John Osborne, from the novel by Henry Fielding; screenplay editor: Sewell Stokes; photog- raphy: Walter Lassally; 2nd unit photography: Manny Wynn; edi- tor: Antony Gibbs; sound: Don Challis; production designer: Ralph Brinton; art director: Ted Marshall; music: John Addison; narrator: Michael MacLiammoir. Cast: Albert Finney (Tom Jones); Susannah York (Sophie Western); Hugh Griffith (Squire Western); Edith Evans (Miss Western); Joan Greenwood (Lady Bellaston); Diane Cilento (Molly Seagrim); George Devine (Squire Allworthy); Joyce Redman (Jenny Jones); David Warner (Blifil); David Tomlinson (Lord Fellamar); Rosalind Knight (Mrs. Fitzpatrick); Peter Bull (Thwackum); John Moffatt (Square); Patsy Rowlands (Honour); Wilfrid Lawson (Black George); Jack MacGowran (Partridge); Freda Jackson (Mrs. Seagrim); Julian Glover (Lt. Northerton); Rachel Kempson (Bridget Allworthy); George A. Cooper (Fitzpatrick); Angela Baddeley (Mrs. Wilkins); Avis Bunnage (Landlady at George Inn); Rosalind Atkinson (Mrs. Miller); James Cairncross (Parson Supple); Redmond Phillips (Lawyer Dowling); Mark Dignam (Lieutenant); Lynn Redgrave (Susan); Jack Stewart (MacLachlan); Michael Brennan (Jailer). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Score, and Best Screenplay. British Film Academy Awards for Best British Film, Best Film from any source, and Best Screenplay. Publications Script: Osborne, John, Tom Jones: A Film Script, London, 1964. Books: Bull, Peter, I Say, Look Here, London, 1965. Manvell, Roger, New Cinema in Britain, London, 1969. Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the 60s, London, 1975. Klein, Michael, and Gillian Parker, editors, The English Novel and the Movies, New York, 1981. Barr, Charles, editor, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London, 1986. Hill, John, Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema 1956–63, Lon- don, 1986. Richardson, Tony, Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography, New York, 1993. Radovich, Don, Tony Richardson: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1995. Welsh, James M., and John C. Tibbetts, The Cinema of Tony Richardson: Essays and Interviews, Albany, 2000. Articles: Cowie, Peter, ‘‘The Face of ‘63—Britain,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1963. Richardson, Tony, in Kine Weekly (London), 27 June 1963. Variety (New York), 31 July 1963. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), August 1963. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1963. New Yorker, 12 October 1963. Cine Fran?aise (Paris), 21 December 1963. Moller, David, ‘‘Britain’s Busiest Angry Young Man,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1964. Battestin, Martin C., ‘‘Osborne’s Tom Jones: Adapting a Classic,’’ in Man and the Movies, edited by W.R. Robinson, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967. Villelaur, Anne, ‘‘Tony Richardson,’’ in Dossiers du cinéma 1, Paris, 1971. City Limits (London), 11 February 1983. ‘‘Albert Finney,’’ in Ciné Revue (Paris), 30 August 1984. Van Gelder, L., ‘‘At the Movies,’’ in New York Times, vol. 138, C6, 15 September 1989. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 475, October 1991. Walker, A., ‘‘Letters: Tom Jones at Home,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, December 1993. Holden, Stephen, ‘‘An Angry Man Found Himself in Tom Jones,’’ in The New York Times, 21 August 1994. *** Tom Jones is one of those films of ambiguous national status, registered as British, and made by a British cast and crew, but funded entirely by the London office of United Artists. As such, it is one of the films on which is negotiated the shift from the ‘‘committed social realism’’ of the early 1960s British cinema to the mainly American- funded ‘‘swinging sixties’’ films of the middle years of the decade. At first sight, being a costume melodrama (and an adaptation of a classic novel) set in the eighteenth century, Tom Jones would seem to be aberrant in relation to both the earlier films, and the different contemporaneity of time, place and energy of the glamorous and eccentric pop culture fantasies of the mid 1960s. But the film was a huge success, accruing four Oscars, garnering much critical ac- claim, and doing record business at the box-office. To some extent, the success of this film paved the way for subsequent films to work in the same free-wheeling, light-hearted and sexually ‘‘permissive’’ mode. Richardson was quoted at the time as saying ‘‘This is our holiday film. We thought it was time we made a really uncommitted film. No social significance for once. No contemporary problems to lay bare, just a lot of colourful, sexy fun’’ (Daily Mail, 2.7.62). Even so, realism was still a key term in the publicity and critical reviews surrounding the film. As the Daily Mail’s reviewer put it, ‘‘a holiday TOM JONES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1224 Tom Jones film it may be, but the master of screen realism is not letting glamour run amok on that account.’’ Authenticity was assumed to be guaran- teed by shooting entirely on location, and by seeking out ‘‘correct’’ period details in setting, props and costumes. Thus much of the power of the film depends upon the elaboration of such narratively redun- dant detail, fleshing out a richly detailed space within which the drama can unfold. The reputation of the production team was important too. Richard- son himself was a founder of and a prolific producer and director for Woodfall, one of the key companies in the film style and independent mode of production that characterised Britain’s new wave. Osborne, who adapted Fielding’s novel for the screen, was another of Woodfall’s founders, and author of two of the plays that the company had adapted earlier, Look Back In Anger and The Entertainer. Finney, who played the lead role, had done the same in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And Lassally, the cameraman who had produced the gritty look of A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, now used similar techniques for this period recreation: having attempted to achieve a realistic effect at one level through the authenticity of period detail, Lassally and Richardson pushed for a different kind of realism at another level by using contemporary documentary camera techniques wherever possible, including shoot- ing on location, using light-weight hand-held cameras, comparatively fast film-stock, and natural light. Without this veneer of surface realism and the cultural status of Fielding’s novel, it seems unlikely that this spectacular and excessive period costume piece, with few of the moral or social commitments of earlier Woodfall films, could have been so easily accommodated by the British critics of the period. And, in fact, some of the reviewers of the film suggested that Tom Jones was far more socially relevant (because of its satire and its plea for tolerance) than the ‘‘superficially contemporary’’ films that had preceded it. It is perhaps the question of style which enables the critic in retrospect to establish as strong a degree of repetition as of differentia- tion between the pre- and post-Tom Jones films. As with Richard- son’s previous two films, both canonised as realist films, Tom Jones displays an eclectic use of non-classical devices, many of them derived from the French nouvelle vague. Alongside relatively classi- cal camera set-ups and scene construction, we find heavily stylised devices for shot- or scene-transitions; an obtrusive foregrounding of non-diegetic music; occasional use of under-cranked camera to speed up action; a particularly self-conscious use of montage sequences; TOP HATFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1225 and so on. But perhaps the most famous of Tom Jones’s stylistic touches is the frequent use of direct address to camera and other means of establishing a subjective rapport between spectator and film (justified as a means of reproducing the narrative voice of the novel). There is much debate amongst critics as to whether this style is ‘‘organic’’ to the film, or whether the film has been invaded by merely disconcerting camera trickery (which was the view of the more ‘‘serious’’ British critics). Either way, it was this type of pop-art modernism that characterised many of the subsequent British films of the mid 1960s. —Andrew Higson TOP HAT USA, 1935 Director: Mark Sandrich Production: RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 105 minutes. Released 6 September 1935. Filmed in RKO studios. Producer: Pandro Berman; screenplay: Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, adapted by Karl Noti, from a play by Alexander Farago and Laszlo Aladar; photography: David Abel and Vernon Walker; editor: William Hamilton; art director: Van Nest Polglase; set designer: Carrol Clark; music and lyrics: Irving Berlin; costume designer: Bernard Newman; choreographers: Fred Astaire with Hermes Pan. Cast: Fred Astaire (Jerry Travers); Ginger Rogers (Dale Tremont); Edward Everett Horton (Horace Hardwick); Helen Broderick (Madge Hardwick); Erik Rhodes (Alberto); Eric Blore (Bates); Donald Meek (Curate); Florence Roberts (Curate’s wife); Gino Corrado (Hotel manager); Peter Hobbs (Call boy). Publications Books: Astaire, Fred, Steps in Time, New York, 1959. Springer, John, All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! A Pictorial History of the Movie Musical, New York, 1966. Baxter, John, Hollywood in the Thirties, New York, 1968. Hackl, Alfons, Fred Astaire and His Work, Vienna, 1970. Thompson, Howard, Fred Astaire: A Pictorial Treasury of His Films, New York, 1970. Bergman, Andrew, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films, New York, 1971. Taylor, John Russell, and Arthur Jackson, The Hollywood Musical, New York, 1971. Croce, Arlene, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, New York, 1972. Green, Stanley and Burt Goldblatt, Starring Fred Astaire, New York, 1973. Green, Benny, Fred Astaire, London, 1979. Top Hat Neale, Stephen, Genre, London, 1980. Altman, Rick, editor, Genre: The Musical, London, 1981. Cebe, Gilles, Fred Astaire, Paris, 1981. Delameter, James, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical, London, 1982. Mueller, John, Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films, New York, 1985. Thomas, Bob, Astaire: The Man, the Dancer, London, 1985. Drouin, Frederique, Fred Astaire, Paris, 1986. Satchell, Tim, Astaire: The Biography, London, 1987. Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical, London and Blooming- ton, Indiana, 1989. Rogers, Ginger, Ginger: My Story, New York, 1991, 1992. Faris, Jocelyn, Ginger Rogers: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1994. Sheridan, Morley, Shall We Dance: The Life of Ginger Rogers, New York, 1995. Billman, Larry, Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1997. Articles: Sennwald, Andre, in New York Times, 30 August 1935. Variety (New York), 4 September 1935. Time (New York), 9 September 1935. Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 25 October 1935. Eustis, M., ‘‘Actor-Dancer Attacks His Part: Fred Astaire,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), May 1937. Pratley, Gerald, ‘‘Fred Astaire’s Film Career,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1957. TOUCH OF EVIL FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1226 Conrad, Derek, ‘‘Two Feet in the Air,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1959. Grieves, Jefferson, in Films and Filming (London), October 1962. Dickens, Homer, ‘‘Ginger Rogers,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1966. Thousand Eyes Magazine (New York), September 1976. Dyer, Richard, ‘‘Entertainment and Utopia,’’ in Movie (London), no. 24, 1977. Johnson, Julia, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 4, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Mueller, J., ‘‘The Filmed Dances of Fred Astaire,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Spring 1981. Medhurst, Andy, ‘‘The Musical,’’ in The Cinema Book, edited by Pam Cook, London, 1985. Biesty, P., ‘‘The Myth of the Playful Dancer,’’ in Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990. ‘‘Nabisco Faces the Music,’’ in Time, vol. 17, 25 February 1991. Silverman, S., ‘‘In ’35 Fred and Ginger Trip the Light Fantastic,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 349, 2 November 1992. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 16, 1995. *** Top Hat was the fourth film made by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for RKO/Radio and the first film written especially to showcase their own unique talents on the screen. In Flying Down to Rio (1933), their first film together, Astaire and Rogers were the second leads to Dolores Del Rio and Gene Raymond, but the screen chemistry created when they danced together made them the ultimate ‘‘stars’’ of that film. Their next two films, The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Roberta (1935), were adapted from successful stage plays with some alteration to suit the Astaire-Rogers combination. By 1935, when Top Hat was released, they were such established stars that RKO hired no less a figure than Irving Berlin to write a new score to accompany the Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott screenplay. Although the plot is run of the mill and displays the usual ‘‘boy meets girl’’ twists of most of the Astaire-Rogers films, the score is one of the best they ever worked with. It includes such now standard songs as ‘‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?’’ ‘‘Cheek to Cheek,’’ and the title song, ‘‘Top Hat,’’ which has become synonymous with the image of Fred Astaire. As with all of their films together, Top Hat is both musical and a story with music. A pure musical has only musical numbers that somehow advance or explicate the plot; the story with music has songs that may be interpolated to entertain the audience yet do not affect the story at all. The title number for Top Hat is an interpolation: Astaire, as Jerry Travers, is a musical star, so that audience sees him performing on stage, and although it is a magnificent example of the inimitable Astaire style, the ‘‘Top Hat’’ number does not give any information about the character or the plot. As Astaire and/or Rogers frequently played characters who are entertainers, their audience was given ample opportunity to see the stars dancing without the necessity of tying the number to the storyline. In Top Hat the most memorable of the musical numbers that advances the plot is ‘‘Cheek to Cheek,’’ perhaps the single most beautiful popular dance for two performers ever filmed. Astaire and Rogers were always cool, perfectly groomed and the essence of 1930s sophistication. The grace and symmetry of their bodies, set against the sleek black-and-white Art Deco set created by Carrol Clark (under the titular direction of Van Nest Polglase), were perfect expressions of the music. In the sequence Travers entices Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) into the dance to win her love. Dale, who thinks that Jerry is married to her best friend Madge Hardwick (Helen Broderick), is at first reluctant. Eventually, though, the romance of the dance and her attraction to Jerry cannot be overcome, and by the midpoint she participates fully. The refrain of the song, ‘‘Heaven, I’m in Heaven’’ is illuminated not only by the dance and the set, but also by the graceful beauty of Rogers’ ostrich feather dress. Although there have been many published reports of fights on the set over the unwieldiness of the dress, it is definitely an asset. There are other important dances in the film, the most memorable of which is the casual, yet sophisticated, tap dance ‘‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain).’’ The style of this dance is happy, flippant, and fun—the complete opposite of the more involved ‘‘Cheek to Cheek’’ dance in which the principals are troubled by their love. In this number, even the rain is a joke, and the stars are all smiles after a brief hesitancy on the part of Rogers. In ‘‘Cheek to Cheek’’ even the beauty of the dance cannot make Rogers smile, and the conclusion seems bittersweet. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers went on to make five more successful films for RKO in the late 1930s and one more, less successful, film in 1948, The Barkleys of Broadway, for MGM. (Ironically, although their last film was the only one to be produced in color, in terms of style it is the most colorless.) Their popularity was a mainstay for RKO in the 1930s, and their reception by both critics and the public alike have barely diminished over the decades. —Patricia King Hanson TOSS ME A DIME See TIRE DIé TOUCH OF EVIL USA, 1958 Director: Orson Welles Production: Universal-International; black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 95 minutes, also variously noted at 105 and 115 minutes. Released 21 May 1958. Filmed spring 1957 in Venice, California. Producer: Albert Zugsmith; screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson; additional director: Harry Keller; photography: Russell Metty; editors: Virgil M. Vogel and Aaron Stell; sound: Leslie I. Carey and Frank Wilkinson; art directors: Alexander Golitzen and Robert Clatworthy; music: Henry Mancini; music director: Joseph Gershenson; costume designer: Bill Thomas. Cast: Charlton Heston (Ramon Miguel ‘‘Mike’’ Vargas); Janet Leigh (Susan Vargas); Orson Welles (Hank Quinlan); Joseph Calleia (Pete Menzies); Akim Tamiroff (Uncle Joe Grandi); Joanna Moore (Marcia Linnekar); Marlene Dietrich (Tanya); Ray Collins (Adair); Dennis Weaver (Motel manager); Victor Millan (Manolo Sanchez); Lalo Rios (Rio); Valentin de Vargas (Pancho); Mort Mills (Schwartz); TOUCH OF EVILFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1227 Touch of Evil Mercedes McCambridge (Hoodlum); Wayne Taylor, Ken Miller, Raymond Rodriguez (Gang members); Michael Sargent (Pretty Boy); Zsa Zsa Gabor (Owner of nightclub); Keenan Wynn (Man); Joseph Cotten (Detective); Phil Harvey (Blaine); Joi Lansing (Blonde); Harry Shannon (Gould); Rusty Wescoatt (Casey); Arlene McQuade (Ginnie); Domenick Delgarde (Lackey); Joe Basulto (Hoodlum); Jennie Dias (Jackie); Yolanda Bojorquez (Bobbie); Eleanor Corado (Lia). Publications Script: Welles, Orson, Touch of Evil, edited by Terry Comito, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1985. Books: Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, New York, 1961. Bessy, Maurice, Orson Welles, Paris, 1963. Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, London, 1965. Bessy, Maurice, Orson Welles, New York, 1971. Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles, Berkeley, 1971. Sarris, Andrew, editor, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1971. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles, London, 1972. Cowie, Peter, A Ribbon of Dreams, New York, 1973. Kaminskly, Stuart, American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974. McCarthy, Tod, and Charles Flynn, editors, Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System, New York, 1975. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles: Actor and Director, New York, 1977. Bazin, Andre, Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, Woodstock, New York, 1979. Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana, 1981. Valentinetti, Claudio M., Orson Welles, Florence, 1981. Bergala, Alain, and Jean Narboni, editors, Orson Welles, Paris, 1982. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, New Jer- sey, 1984. Leigh, Janet, There Really Was a Hollywood, South Yarmouth, 1984, 1985. Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, New York, 1985. TOUCH OF EVIL FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1228 Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography, New York, 1985. Parra, Daniele, and Jacques Zimmer, Orson Welles, Paris, 1985. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, editors, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York, 1985. Crowther, Bruce, Charlton Heston: The Epic Presence, London, 1986. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles: A Celebration, London, 1986. Cotten, Joseph, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, New York, 1987. Wood, Bret, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1990. Howard, James, The Complete Films of Orson Welles, Secaucus, 1991. Beja, Morris, Perspective on Orson Welles, New York, 1995. Heston, Charlton, In The Arena: An Autobiography, New York, 1995. Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, New York, 1997. Heston, Charlton, and Jean-Pierre Isbouts, Charlton Heston’s Holly- wood: 50 Years in American Film, New York, 1998. Welles, Orson, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1998. Munby, Jonathan, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil, Chicago, 1999. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles, New York, 2000. Articles: Interview with Welles in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 20 May 1958. Interview with Welles in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1958. Truffaut, Fran?ois, in Arts (Paris), 4 June 1958. Knight, Arthur, in Saturday Review (New York), 7 June 1958. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 12 June 1958. Domarchi, Jean, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July 1958. ‘‘L’Oeuvre d’Orson Welles,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Septem- ber 1958. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Heroes of Welles,’’ in Film (London), no. 28, 1961. Allais, Jean-Claude, in Premier Plan (Lyons), March 1961. Johnson, William, ‘‘Orson Welles: Of Time and Loss,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1967. Comito, Terry, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Prokosch, Mike, ‘‘Orson Welles: An Introduction,’’ in Film Com- ment (New York), Summer 1971. Delson, James, ‘‘Heston on Welles,’’ in Take One (Montreal), July- August 1971. Schrader, Paul, ‘‘Notes on Film Noir,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1972. Ecran (Paris), July 1972. Krueger, E. M., ‘‘Touch of Evil: Style Expressing Content,’’ in Cinema Journal (Iowa City), Fall 1972. Hale, N., ‘‘Welles and the Logic of Death,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1974. Lacombe, A., in Ecran (Paris), January 1975. Heath, Stephen, ‘‘Film and System: Terms of an Analysis,’’ in Screen (London), Spring 1975. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1975. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Welles, Shakespeare, and Webster,’’ in Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London), 1976. Norharrd, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Summer 1977. Henley, John, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 19 April 1978. Bywater, W., ‘‘Subject Position,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 1, 1979. Cremonini, G., in Cineforum (Bergamo), May 1982. Stubbs, John, ‘‘The Evolution of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil from Novel to Film,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Win- ter 1985. Stubbs, John, and Terry Comito, ‘‘Dialogue,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Spring 1985. ‘‘Touch of Evil Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January- February 1986. Nielsen, N. A., ‘‘Et allerhelvedes perspektiv,’’ in Kosmorama (Co- penhagen), Fall 1989. Bywater, W., ‘‘The Visual Pleasure of Patriarchal Cinema: Welles’ Touch of Evil,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 3, 1990. Heston, C., ‘‘Touch of Genius,’’ in National Review, vol. 44, 3 Febru- ary 1992. Rosenbaum, J., ‘‘Orson Welles’ Memo to Universal: Touch of Evil,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 1, 1992. Vaughan, Don, ‘‘Confessions of a Teenage Heartthrob,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 37, February-March 1993. Wolthuis, J.J.C., in Score (Lelystad), vol. 89, December 1993. Schmidt, N., ‘‘Montage et scenario,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur- Noireau), vol. 72, no. 3, 1994. Hall, John W., ‘‘Touch of Psycho?: Hitchcock’s Debt to Welles,’’ in Bright Lights (Cincinnati), no. 14, 1995. Wollen, Peter, ‘‘Foreign Relations: Welles and Touch of Evil,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 10, October 1996. Kau, E., ‘‘Great Beginnings—and Endings: Made by Orson Welles,’’ in P.O.V., vol. 2, December 1996. McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Restored Evil Approximates Welles’ Editing- Room Touch,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 352, no. 4, 7 Septem- ber 1998. Weinraub, Bernard, ‘‘Touch of Memory,’’ in The New York Times, 18 September 1998. Thomas, Fran?ois, ‘‘Henry Mancini et La Soif du mal,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 452, October 1998. Bowman, James, ‘‘Self-Ignorance: Nowadays, Self-Deception Passes for Self-Knowledge,’’ in The American Spectator, vol. 31, no. 11, November 1998. *** Touch of Evil shows how Orson Welles refashions the Baroque style, inaugurated in Citizen Kane, in terms of the post-war film anticipating the experiment of New Wave cinema. If Welles’s oeuvre can be mapped according to Henri Focillon’s concept of the ‘‘life of forms in art,’’ it can be said that Citizen Kane marks a classic, if not ‘‘experimental’’ phase in a cycle that Touch of Evil completes in its self-reflective and expressly decadent mode. Inspired by Whit Masterson’s pulpy Badge of Evil, the film tells of an erstwhile narcotic agent’s attempt to foil a crime committed on the Mexican border just as he prepares to celebrate his honeymoon with his shining new wife (Janet Leigh). Multiple frame-ups abound. The agent, Vargas (Charlton Heston), finds himself amidst a band of tawdry outlaws under the control of the local chief of police—the obese Hank Quinlan (Welles). The plot leads through the sleaze of Tijuana (set in Venice, California) over dusty vistas of dirt roads, into a decrepit motel filled with sexed-up punks reeking of booze and dope, and through a labyrinth of oil derricks by a river flowing with trash. The film revives film noir at a time when the genre is spent. It brings into view questions of framing, editing, and desire at the basis of spectatorship in general. Because it alludes to former moments in Welles’s oeuvre, it is both a filmic autobiography, like The Lady from Shanghai, and a collage of transfilmic obsessions. The plot hinges on a rebus. After strangling his wig-wearing henchman (Akim Tamiroff), TRAINSPOTTINGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1229 Quinlan forgets his cane—or former name in Citizen Kane—such that the play on the word and object returns, like the repressed, to convict him of his many former crimes. Shakespeare seems to inspire the scenario. The film essays decadence in ways that make Welles something of the Jack Falstaff of the second part of Henry the Fourth. Dennis Weaver plays the role of a fool clearly drawn from the comic character in Macbeth. Welles’s grotesque body occupies the center of the film. A wide- angle lens records from numerous angles its immensity in baroque caricature. The camera usually pans quickly or crabs to draw the spectator’s eyes to spherical aberrations distorting the edges of the shots. A highly mannered perspective results, with curvilinear views extending the rotundity of Welles’s body all over the frame. Else- where the wide angle lens accelerates the narrative by accentuating movement, compressing characters in the foreground and back- ground alike, and turning with velocity such that no stable visual order results. The opening crane shot of over two minutes’ duration registers the credits, engages the narrative, and breaks with the crack of an explosion behind the newlyweds’ first kiss. The camera exploits the optical range of the shorter focal length of the lens by simulating high speed driving in matte shots projected behind a car to create the effect of Welles and Heston whizzing down the streets of Tijuana. They speak calmly on as the car goes at a breakneck clip through a landscape of poverty. Welles amplifies the soundtrack. Voice and clatter are reported percussively and cacaphonously. ‘‘Reported’’ events resound in a remarkable final sequence: Vargas follows Quinlan through a maze of iron girders and under a bridge that echoes the speech on the sound track. Because Vargas has planted a microphone in Quinlan’s pocket, the viewer hears the heave and slur of the antagonist’s breathing and mutterings against a recording that plays back the immediate past of the film, inscribing the memory of episodes in the film on a register coextensive with the present. In the finale, blood drips from Quinlan’s last victim, the body sprawled on the bridge above the murderer who is at the edge of the river below. Droplets fall onto Quinlan’s chubby hand, thus bringing the play of sounds and visuals back into a context resembling Elizabethan tragedy. Quinlan is marked by the blood- stains, soon cornered and shot, his great body falling into a pool of flotsam. ‘‘Too bad. He was a great detective but a lousy cop,’’ eulogizes Menzies (Joseph Calleia); to which Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) responds in a thick German accent, topping the entire film, ‘‘He was some kind of a man.’’ Despite having no narrative role in the story, Dietrich’s presence is manifold. One of Quinlan’s former lovers, now a wizened fortune teller overlaid with heavy makeup, she smokes cigarettes in poses reminiscent of the aging beauty Fritz Lang created for Rancho Notorious six years before. By facing the camera frontally, she pulls into the present a filmic legacy that reaches back both to Lang and to von Sternberg of the 1930s. Her remark that Quinlan’s time is ‘‘all played out’’ is doubly ironic in view of the portable television set, seen in the background of her cluttered quarters, presaging the end of the studio tradition. Their banter is laced with allusion to Quinlan’s passion for candy bars: his obesity becomes a sign, on another allegorical level, of the director’s career being one of excess, genius, and waste. Her Tarot reading seals the anti-hero’s fate and forces him to return to the narrative. Touch of Evil stages sexual violence in a sequence set at the ‘‘Mirador’’ motel. Having consigned his wife in a room while he chases his suspects, Vargas retrieves her after making repeated telephone calls. Supine, heaving, in the bondage of her corset, Suzy (Leigh, whose name is again a reminder of the Suzy of Citizen Kane) is framed in a pose epitomizing Hollywood’s model of desire, but only before the camera tears it to shreds, in a style that combines the rhetoric of torture that Rossellini had inaugurated in Open City with oblique allusion to Reefer Madness. Time and again the effects suggest that violence is a matter of optics, and that it owes its force to conventions that Hollywood had produced in its representation of women in the tradition of film noir. In Touch of Evil the studio style is distorted to comic excess. Here are located the virtual politics of Welles’s work, in the mix of lenticular experiment and the essay of a Shakespearean type of narrative. In the last decade the film has been subject of a dazzling reading by Stephen Heath in Questions of Cinema. The renascence of Welles’s feature owes much to the complexities Heath unravels through an alert and detailed reading inspired by a blend of psychoa- nalysis and politics. The film is of a force and heritage going far beyond its period. —Tom Conley TRAIN WITHOUT A TIMETABLE See VLAK BEZ VOZNOG REDA TRAINSPOTTING UK, 1996 Director: Danny Boyle Production: Channel Four Films, Figment Films, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (U.S.), and Noel Gay Motion Picture Company; color, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes (94 in United States); length: 2650 meters. Released 23 February 1996. Filmed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Corrour Station, Scotland, and London, England. Cost: $3.5 million (U.S.). Producer: Christopher Figg, Andrew Macdonald; screenplay: John Hodge; from the novel by Irvine Welsh; cinematographer: Brian Tufano; editor: Masahiro Hirakubo; casting: Andy Pryor, Gail Stevens; production design: Kave Quinn; art direction: Tracey Gallacher; costume design: Rachael Fleming; makeup: Robert McCann; special effects: Grant Mason, Tony Steers. Cast: Ewan McGregor (Mark ‘‘Rent-boy’’ Renton); Ewen Bremner (Daniel ‘‘Spud’’ Murphy); Jonny Lee Miller (Simon David ‘‘Sick Boy’’ Williamson); Kevin McKidd (Tommy MacKenzie); Robert Carlyle (Francis (Franco) Begbie); Kelly MacDonald (Diane); Peter Mullan (Swanney); James Cosmo (Mr. Renton); Eileen Nicholas (Mrs. Renton); Susan Vidler (Allison); Pauline Lynch (Lizzy); Shirley Henderson (Gail); Stuart McQuarrie (Gavin/US Tourist); Irvine Welsh (Mikey Forrester); Dale Winton (Game Show Host). Awards: British Academy Award for Best Screenplay (Adapted) (John Hodge), 1996; Seattle International Film Festival Golden Space Needle Awards for Best Director (Danny Boyle) and Best Film, 1996; Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film, 1996; Evening TRAINSPOTTING FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1230 Trainspotting Standard British Film Award for Best Screenplay (Hodge), 1997; London Critics Circle ALFS Awards for British Screenwriter of the Year (Hodge) and British Actor of the Year (McGregor), 1997; Bodil Festival Award for Best European Film (Boyle), 1997; Brit Award for Best Soundtrack, 1997. Publications Script: Hodge, John, Trainspotting, London, 1996. Articles: Charity, Tom, ‘‘The Other Side of the Tracks,’’ interview with Danny Boyle in Time Out (London), no. 1328, 31 January 1996. O’Hagan, Andrew, and Geoffrey Macnab, ‘‘The Boys Are Back in Town,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 2, Febru- ary 1996. Kemp, Philip, review in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 3, March 1996. Kermode, Mark, ‘‘End Notes,’’ Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 3, March 1996. Review in Positif (Paris), no. 425–426, July-August 1996. Kennedy, Harlan, ‘‘Kiltspotting: Highland Reels,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 4, July-August 1996. Thompson, Andrew, ‘‘Trains, Veins and Heroin Deals,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 77, no. 8, August 1996. McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Highland Fling,’’ in Premiere (London), August 1996. Kauffman, S., ‘‘On Films: Scotland Now, England Then,’’ in New Republic, 19–26 August 1996. Rall, Veronika, ‘‘Trainspotting,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 13, no. 8, August 1996. Gelman-Waxner, Libby, ‘‘Swill Decor,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), November 1996. Carroll, Tomm, ‘‘Criterion scores uncut heroin heroes,’’ in DGA (Los Angeles), vol. 22, no. 2, May-June 1997. Cardullo, Bert, ‘‘Fiction into Film, or Bringing Welsh to a Boyle,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 25, no. 3, July 1997. *** Until the mid-1990s, those British films that achieved any kind of overseas success were generally well-behaved affairs. There were sensitive literary adaptations from the school of Merchant-Ivory; THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADREFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1231 innocuous comedies about the twitteries of the idle rich; or, for more rarified audiences, the wry, politically-charged work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. The idea of a British movie that was fast, rude, energetic, scabrously funny, and fizzing with switched-on youth appeal would have seemed outlandish. Then came Trainspotting. The team of director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge, and pro- ducer Andrew Macdonald had already signaled the arrival of a new dynamic force in British cinema with their first film, the stylish, pitch- black comedy Shallow Grave (1994). Trainspotting shares its prede- cessor’s headlong trajectory, while replacing its visual elegance and poised cruel humour with a mass of relentlessly shitty detail and a manic cackle of wrecked mirth—elements drawn from its source material, Irvine Welsh’s cult novel of Edinburgh junkiedom. Like Welsh’s prose, Trainspotting moves with the rhythm and energy of the fractured, street-level culture it portrays—and even celebrates. At once exhilarating and despairing, lurching from exuberance to inertia, from frenetic humour to gut-wrenching squalor, it enters into the lives of its deadbeat heroin-addicts on their own terms, without patronising or pitying. When the characters are hyped—whether on sex, drugs, booze, or violence—the film shares their mood, the camera scurrying, swooping, gliding or, as during one lad’s speed-fueled monologue to a gobsmacked interview panel, pogo-ing back and forth before him in irrepressible delight. Boyle’s signature visual tropes—frenetic camera, skewed fram- ing, overheated colours—are constantly in evidence. Scenes are often mockingly stylised: the mugging of a hapless American tourist in a pub toilet is choreographed into a deliberate, formalised ballet. Brian Tufano’s lighting and Kave Quinn’s production design move easily from heightened realism to near-surrealism. Scenes featuring the pusher Swanney, known as ‘‘Mother Superior’’ (from the length of his habit), are bathed in saturated reds and blues, in ironic simulation of light through stained glass. And when after the cot- death of a baby the agonised young mother’s smackhead friends stand helplessly around, unable to drag themselves out of a state of numbed non-reaction, all colour seems drained from the scene, grey faces in a grey gloom. Boyle draws superb ensemble acting from his cast—especially from Robert Carlyle as Begbie, a scarifying psychotic so high on mindless violence he doesn’t even need drugs. As Mark Renton, the narrator through whose frequently zonked-out consciousness events are refracted, Ewan McGregor gives a fine weaselly performance, at once spiky and vulnerable. Rich in local colour—it was largely filmed around the mean streets of some of Edinburgh’s less salubrious districts—Trainspotting is thoroughly Scottish in its caustic tone and gallows humour. Not that there’s the least hint of tartan nationalism; on the contrary. Dragged off by a friend to appreciate the glories of the Scots countryside, Renton launches into a bitingly contemptuous riff on his fellow-countrymen. ‘‘I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We’re colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, healthy culture to be colonised by. No—we’re ruled by effete arseholes! What does that make us?’’ The film’s pace and insolent, scatological humour, set to a pulsing Britpop score, appealed strongly to younger audiences, as did its unpreachy attitude to drugs. As Renton reflects, in the script’s most notorious line, heroin may screw you up but it can also give you a high a thousand times better ‘‘than the best orgasm you ever had.’’ Though never discounting the ravages of heroin addiction, the film-makers rejected any simplistic just-say-no attitude. ‘‘The whole reason we wanted to do this film,’’ Boyle remarked at the time, ‘‘is to say people do drugs because you actually have a good time. That’s the bit that’s always left out.... In the end the film conforms like every other film about heroin, it shows you how in fact it will destroy you. But there are people, like Irvine Welsh, who go through it and come out the other side. You have to tell the truth about that, even though you’re accused of encouraging drug use.’’ Accused, of course, they were. The ensuing controversy did the film nothing but good at the box-office, and Trainspotting—along with its distinctive orange-toned publicity material—became one of the most influential films of the decade, headbutting audiences the world over into a lastingly new perception of what British films could look like. Boyle found himself compared to Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, and other masters of guerilla cinema—influences he readily acknowledges, along with Dick Lester and Kathryn Bigelow. ‘‘I feed off other stuff deliberately. That’s not unhealthy.... I love looting people and ideas.’’ Since then, inevitably, Trainspotting has itself been looted, giving rise to a rash of often mediocre British crime ‘n drugs youth-culture movies. Boyle, Hodge, and Macdonald, mean- while, have yet to equal—let alone surpass—the impact of their seminal second movie. —Philip Kemp TRAUM VOM GLüCK See M?rchen vom Glück THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS See O THIASOS THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE USA, 1948 Director: John Huston Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 126 minutes. Released January 1948. Filmed Spring through Summer 1947 in Tampico, Mexico and in the mountains near San José de Purua, Mexico. Cost: $3,000,000. Producer: Henry Blanke; screenplay: John Huston, from the novel by B. Traven; photography: Ted McCord; editor: Owen Marks; sound recordist: Robert B. Lee; art director: John Hughes; music: Max Steiner; special effects: William McGann and H. F. Koenekamp; technical advisers: Ernesto A. Romero and Antonio Arriaga. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Fred C. Dobbs); Walter Huston (Howard); Tim Holt (Curtin); Bruce Bennett (Cody); Alfonso Bedoya (Gold Hat); Barton MacLane (McCormick); A. Soto Rangel (Presidente); Manuel Donde (El Jefe); José Torvay (Pablo); Margarito Luna (Pancho); Jacqueline Dalya (Flashy girl); Robert (Bobby) Blake (Mexican boy); John Huston (Man in white suit); Jack Holt (Flophouse bum); Ann Sheridan (Streetwalker). THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1232 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Awards: New York Film Critics Awards for Best Picture and Best Direction, 1948; Oscars for Best Direction and Best Supporting Actor (Walter Huston), 1948; Venice Film Festival, Best Music (Steiner), 1948. Publications Script: Huston, John, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, edited by James Naremore, Madison, Wisconsin, 1979. Books: Davay, Paul, John Huston, Paris, 1957. Allais, Jean-Claude, John Huston, Paris, 1960. McCarty, Clifford, Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart, New York, 1965. Michael, Paul, Humphrey Bogart: The Man and His Films, Indian- apolis, Indiana, 1965. Nolan, William, John Huston, King Rebel, New York, 1965. Benayoun, Robert, John Huston, Paris, 1966; as John Huston: La Grande Ombre de l’aventure, Paris, 1985. Cecchini, Riccardo, John Huston, 1969. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Western Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1971. Tozzi, Romano, John Huston, A Picture Treasury of His Films, New York, 1971. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974; revised edition, Chicago, 1985. Pratley, Gerald, The Cinema of John Huston, New York, 1977. Kaminsky, Stuart M., John Huston: Maker of Magic, London, 1978. Madsen, Axel, John Huston, New York, 1978. Huston, John, An Open Book, New York, 1980. Miller, Gabriel, Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film, New York, 1980. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Pettigrew, Terence, Bogart: A Definitive Study of His Film Career, London, 1981. Hammen, Scott, John Huston, Boston, 1985. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADREFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1233 McCarty, John, The Films of John Huston, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1987. Studlar, Gaylyn, editor, and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston & the American Experience, Washington, D.C., 1993. Cooper, Stephen, editor, Perspectives on John Huston, New York, 1994. Brill, Lesley, John Huston’s Filmmaking, New York, 1997. Cohen, Allen, John Huston: A Guide to References and Resources, London, 1997. Myers, Jeffrey C., Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, Boston, 1997. Cunningham, Ernest W., Ultimate Bogie, Los Angeles, 1999. Duchovnay, Gerald, Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibilography, Westport, 1999. Articles: Allen, L., ‘‘On the Set with John Huston,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), July 1947. Variety (New York), 7 January 1948. New York Times, 24 January 1948. Time (New York), 2 February 1948. Morton, Lawrence, in Hollywood Quarterly, Spring 1948. Sequence (London), Spring 1949. Fowler, Dan, ‘‘Walter Huston’s Bad Boy John,’’ in Look (New York), 10 May 1949. Desternes, Jean, in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 8, 1950. Subiela, Michel, in Positif (Paris), no. 3, 1950. Pilati, Robert, in Ecran Fran?ais (Paris), 15 February 1950. McCarty, Clifford, ‘‘Humphrey Bogart,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1957. Archer, Eugene, in Film Culture (New York), no. 19, 1959. ‘‘John Huston,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September and October 1959. Vermilye, Jerry, in Films in Review (New York), February 1960. Majdalany, Fred, ‘‘Viewing Report: Treasure on Sierra Madre,’’ in Screen Education (London), March-April 1965. Bachman, Gideon, ‘‘How I Make Films: An Interview with John Huston,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1965. Jones, Dupre, ‘‘Beating the Devil: 30 Years of John Huston,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1973. Graham, Olive, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 3 May 1979. ‘‘John Huston,’’ and ‘‘Walter Huston,’’ in Film Dope (London), January 1983. Buckley, M., ‘‘John Huston,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1985. Combs, Richard, ‘‘The Man Who Would be Ahab: The Myths and Masks of John Huston,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1985. Schickel, Richard, ‘‘Bogart,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May- June 1986. Engell, J., ‘‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: B. Traven, John Huston and Ideology in Film Adaptation,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 17, no. 4, October 1989. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 5, 1990. Souder, William, ‘‘High Adventure: The Art of Making a Film Epic,’’ in Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, vol. 25, no. 2, Febru- ary 1997. *** The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has become the archetypal John Huston film. One reason is that it is a clear examination of the exploration or the quest. As in many of his films to come (and The Maltese Falcon, to some extent, before it), Huston here examines a small group of people on a quest for wealth. Generally, in his films with this theme the members of the group accomplish their initial goal: they obtain the money or the treasure. Once having attained it, however, they often find the potential power it brings too much to handle. Human greed, weakness, or obsession destroy their victory. This is remarkably true of Treasure, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Kremlin Letter, and The Man Who Would Be King. In all these films, however, Huston does not simply examine greed and present a moral statement about it. He examines the disintegration or change within the individual who has to learn to cope with the specter of wealth of power and the erosion of the fragile group or couple when chance, greed, envy, or obsession intrude on their existence. Treasure is not a moral statement by Huston but an examination of characters under pressure, who fall apart when least expected to and rise to noble reactions when no reason is given to believe they will. In order to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston convinced Warner Brothers to let him shoot on location for ten weeks in Mexico. In documentaries in the army, he had grown accustomed to location work and now felt comfortable with it. ‘‘Locationing? Nothing to it,’’ he said. ‘‘The only time it’s tough to make pictures on location is when someone is shooting at you.’’ In his search for the concrete in making the film, Huston went to the extreme of shooting exteriors in San Jose de Purua, an isolated village 140 miles north of Mexico city. Humphrey Bogart, who played Dobbs, recalled: ‘‘John wanted everything perfect. If he saw a nearby mountain that would serve for photographic purposes, that mountain was not good; too easy to reach. If we could go to a location site without fording a couple of streams and walking through snake-infested areas in the scorching sun, then it wasn’t quite right.’’ Huston’s other stars included his father, Walter Huston, as How- ard, and cowboy actor Tim Holt as Curtin. Dobbs is frequently described as a moral brute and a madman, but clearly he is a highly contradictory character until his crack-up. He is initially generous and willing to share his cash, and he rather nobly throws away the gold that Curtin offers him to pay back the extra money he has put to finance the trip. Later, it is Dobbs who agrees to help Howard rebuild the ‘‘wounded’’ mountain. Howard, the doctor/father, constantly warns that gold is a potential disease. He is aware of the danger and protects himself, and Curtin also learns to do so, but even Curtin has a moment of hesitation when he almost leaves Dobbs in the mine after a collapse. It is Dobbs who succumbs to the disease, but he is not viewed as evil by Huston or, for that matter, by Howard. Time called the film ‘‘one of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk . Walter Huston’s performance is his best job in a lifetime of acting.’’ Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote that ‘‘Huston has shaped a searching drama of the collision of civilization’s vicious greeds with the instinct for self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down.’’ James Agee and Newsweek also praised the film, but there was some antagonism. John McCarten in The New Yorker said the film could be reduced to the idea that greed does not pay. He went on to say that ‘‘even if the premise is granted, the film’s methods of elaborating on it are certainly something less than beguiling.’’ While the mixed reviews filtered in, Huston plunged into his next project, but his work was disrupted when the Academy Awards for TRETIA MESHCHANSKAIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1234 1948 were announced. For the first time, a father-and-son team won the awards, John as best director, Walter as best supporting actor. —Stuart M. Kaminsky THE TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS. See L’ALBERO DEGLI ZOCCOLI TRETIA MESHCHANSKAIA (Liubov v Troem; Bed and Sofa) USSR, 1927 Director: Abram Room Production: Sovkino; silent with Russian intertitles; black and white, 16 mm; running time: 75 minutes. Released 15 March 1927. Filmed in 1927 on location in Moscow. Producer: Sovkino studio; screenplay: Viktor Shklovskii, Abram Room; photography: Grigorii Giber; assistant directors: Sergei Iutkevich, E. Kuzis; art directors: V. Rakhals, Sergei Iutkevich. Cast: Nikolai Batalov (Kolia); Liudmila Semenova (Liuda); Vladimir Fogel (Volodia); L. Iurenev (doorman). Publications Articles: ‘‘Bed and Sofa,’’ in Close Up, December 1927. A.W., ‘‘Bed and Sofa at the Film Society,’’ in Close Up, May 1929. H.C., ‘‘Note on Bed and Sofa,’’ in Close Up, May 1929. Hill, Steven P., ‘‘Bed and Sofa,’’ in Film Heritage, Fall 1971. Burns, Paul E., ‘‘An NEP Moscow Address: Abram Room’s Third Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa) in Historical Context,’’ in Film and History, December 1982. Mayne, Judith, ‘‘Bed and Sofa and the Edge of Domesticity,’’ in Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film, Columbus, Ohio, 1989. Youngblood, Denise J., ‘‘The Fiction Film as a Source for Soviet Social History: The Third Meshchanskaia Street Affair,’’ in Film and History, September 1989. *** Tretia Meshchanskaia, Abram Room’s celebrated 1927 melo- drama about a menage a trois, made its way West under a variety of titles, among them Bed and Sofa, Three in a Cellar, Old Dovecots, and Cellars of Moscow. The film enjoys the distinction of having been banned (as well as praised) on two continents. Bed and Sofa, as the film is best known in the United States, was Room’s fourth film. Like many early Soviet directors, Room (1894–1976) had come to the cinema along a circuitous path. A physician specializing in psychiatry and neurology, he served as a medical officer with the Red Army during the Russian civil war that followed the revolutions of 1917. Originally from Lithuania, Room decided to stay in Moscow after demobilization and began to work in the Theater of the Revolution. None of Room’s three previous pictures—two short comedies from 1924 that are no longer extant and the action adventure Death Bay (Bukhta smerti, 1926)—prepared critics or audiences for Bed and Sofa, a brilliant psychological chamber drama that lay bare the dysfunctions and contradiction of early Soviet society. From the opening shot, we know that we are not going to see a schematic narrative about enthusiastic revolutionaries. Liuda, a bored housewife who could not be more unlike the prototypical Bolshevik ‘‘New Woman,’’ lives in a one-room base- ment apartment on Third Meshchanskaia Street (the literal translation of the film’s original title), a petty-bourgeois neighborhood in Mos- cow. She spends her days idly, mainly reading magazines, notably the popular movie fan magazine Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran). Her husband, Kolia, is a charming and good-natured but dictatorial and egocentric stonemason. The couple is soon joined by Kolia’s old war buddy, Volodia, a printer who cannot find an apartment in Moscow due to the severe housing shortage that was still a major social problem ten years after the revolution. Liuda is quite understandably annoyed by the addition of yet another person to their cramped apartment; of course she has not been consulted. Yet Volodia, ingratiating and helpful, quickly wins her over by proving the perfect lodger. The sexual tension between Liuda and Volodia is palpable from the beginning, so when Kolia is called to a job out of town, it is scarcely surprising that Volodia takes advantage of the opportunity to woo Liuda openly. In the movie’s most famous and exhilarating scene, Volodia invites Liuda to take a plane ride with him as part of Aviation Day celebrations. This is the first time she has been outside the apartment since the movie began; what joy! (And what stunning aerial shots of a Moscow that is no more.) When Kolia returns home, he finds himself banished to the sofa. But now that Volodia is the ‘‘husband,’’ he quickly begins acting like one. If anything, he is more boorish and tyrannical than Kolia ever was. The two men resume their friendship, joking and playing checkers while Liuda sulks. She attempts, fruitlessly, to regain control over her life by sleeping with her husband again. When Kolia and Volodia learn she is pregnant, they are outraged and demand that she have an abortion, since paternity definitely cannot be established. Sad and nervous, Liuda is packed off to a private clinic, where other clients are a prostitute and a young girl. Standing at a window, awaiting her turn, she spies (whether in reality or in her mind’s eye) a baby in a carriage on the sidewalk below. She has a feminist epiphany. For the first time, Liuda decides to take control of her own life, to have the baby and leave the corruption of the big city. In the movie’s closing scene, we see a confident, smiling Liuda leaning out the train window, cross cut with shots of her two husbands’ annoy- ance, and then relief, that she has gone. They resume their immature, carefree, bachelor life in their dingy basement room on Third Meshchanskaia Street. Bed and Sofa is beautifully shot, acted, and edited. It was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of silent film art and remains fresh and appealing three-quarters of a century after its release. The film’s producer, the state-run studio Sovkino, eagerly offered this well- made film for international distribution, but it was banned in Western Europe and the United States for its sexual content and ambiguous TRIUMPH DES WILLENSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1235 moral message. Yet, though the film was not commercially exhibited in the West, it was widely seen through the film society circuits, which could avoid censorship since they were ‘‘private’’ clubs. Bed and Sofa’s reception in the USSR was controversial for reasons that sound the same as those in the West but were in fact quite different. Room had intended not only to make a picture exploring the social problems of urban life during the last years of the New Economic Policy (1921–28), but specifically to support the state’s campaign against the sexual freedom of the revolutionary years and against abortion on demand. What went wrong? The Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARK) quickly and unequivocally praised the film in its journal Cinema Front (Kino-front) as ‘‘one of the most successful pictures of Soviet production,’’ which dealt with thorny problems in a ‘‘soft [meaning non-didactic], artistic, and consistently Soviet way.’’ Yet despite ARK’s strong support, the film was excoriated for the six weeks before its release in a carefully orchestrated campaign carried out in the pages of the trade newspaper Cinema (Kino), the fan magazine Soviet Screen (which apparently did not appreciate Liuda’s patronage), and the conservative Soviet Cinema (Sovetskoe kino, organ of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which had oversight over the film industry). Room’s movie was variously labelled ‘‘psycho- pathological,’’ a ‘‘Western European adulterous romance,’’ and an ‘‘apology for adultery.’’ Given the large number of European and American entertainment films that dominated Soviet screens in the late 1920s, along with the frankly Westernized products of the semi- private Mezhrabpom studio, the level of vilification Bed and Sofa was subjected to was suspiciously excessive. Indeed, the film was suc- cessfully released, although with a new title, Menage a trois (Liubov v troem), that would not connect it to the ‘‘Third Meshchanskaia Street scandal.’’ In 1927, although few Soviet citizens were aware of it, the stage was being set for the Cultural Revolution of 1928–32. By the early 1930s, Soviet arts and entertainments would be stripped of any remaining creative autonomy to serve the interests of the state. This period of social and cultural upheaval was followed by the formal adoption of the aesthetic credo of ‘‘Socialist Realism’’ at the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. Abram Room and his film were unwit- tingly swept up into the whirlwind of change, criticized for lack of foresight more than anything else. Although Socialist Realism would not be canonized for another seven years, its attributes were central to the cultural debates of the late 1920s. Bed and Sofa fit many of Socialist Realism’s main criteria: it was plotted, contemporary, realistic, and tendentious. But it had three major ideological failings—none of which were related to sex. The first was the lack of the positive hero, and worse, the fact that the film is dominated by three negative characters. While Liuda is indeed transformed from a passive and amoral social ‘‘parasite’’ to, presum- ably, a mother and a contributing member of society, this is only because of her desire to actualize her ‘‘petty-bourgeois’’ individual- ism. Kolia may be a worker, but he refuses to attend political meetings because they are boring. As for Volodia—he even looks neurotic (actor Vladimir Fogel’s struggle with mental illness was well-known in film circles; he committed suicide in 1929). Second, Socialist Realism is supposed to show life as it should be; the path to the new world. Reform in Bed and Sofa is partial at best. Third, the film fails to include a true proletarian as counterexample to Kolia the stonemason and Volodia the printer, petty-bourgeois craftsmen. The cultural revolution about to be unleashed would be in large part an attack to eradicate meshchanstvo (petty-bourgeois philistinism). This film embodies it, especially in its original Russian title Third Meshchanskaia Street, which comes from the same root word. No wonder the studio decided to release it as Menage a trois. As a work of art, Bed and Sofa remains a superb example of European silent film. Given its context and subtext, it must also be considered one of the most important films in early Soviet cinema history. —Denise J. Youngblood THE TRIAL See LE PROCES A TRIP TO THE MOON See LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE TRIUMPH DES WILLENS (Triumph of the Will) Germany, 1935 Director: Leni Riefenstahl Production: Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa); black and white, 35mm; running time: 120 minutes. Released March 1935. Filmed 4–10 September 1934 in Nuremburg at the Nazi Party Congress. Producer: Leni Riefenstahl; editor: Leni Riefenstahl; subtitles: Walter Ruttmann; photography: Sepp Allgeier, Karl Attenberger, and Werner Bohne, plus several assistants; architectural designs: Albert Speer; music: Herbert Windt. Awards: National Film Prize of Germany, 1935; Venice Biennale, Gold Medal, 1936 (most sources do not list this award for Triumph, though David Gunston in Current Biography states that Triumph did receive this award); Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Tech- niques (Paris), Grand Prize, 1937. Publications Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton, New Jer- sey, 1947. Hull, David Stewart, Film in the Third Reich, Berkeley, 1969. Cadard, Pierre, and Francis Courtade, Histoire du Cinema Nazi, Paris, 1972. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Barsam, Richard, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will, Bloomington, Indiana, 1975. TRIUMPH DES WILLENS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1236 Triumph des Willens Infield, Glenn, Leni Riefenstahl: Fallen Film Goddess, New York, 1976. Phillips, Baxter, Swastika: The Cinema of Oppression, New York, 1976. Rhodes, Anthony, Propaganda, the Art of Persuasion: World War II, New York, 1976. Ford, Charles, Leni Riefenstahl, Paris, 1978. Hinton, David, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978, 1991, 2000. Infield, Glenn, Leni Riefenstahl et le 3e Reich, Paris, 1978. Berg-Pan, Renada, Leni Riefenstahl, edited by Warren French, Bos- ton, 1980. Nowotny, Peter, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens: Zur kritik Dokumentarischer Filmarbeit im NS-Farchismus, Dortmund, 1981. Welch, David, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945, Oxford, 1983; revised edition, 1987. Heck-Rabi, Louise, Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1984. Loiperdinger, Martin, Der Parteitagsfilm Triumph des Willens von Leni Riefenstahl: Rituale der Mobilmachung, Opladen, 1987. Riefenstahl, Leni, Memoiren, Munich, 1987. Deutschmann, Linda, Triumph of the Will: The Image of the Third Reich, Wakefield, New Hampshire, 1991. Leeflang, Thomas, Leni Riefenstahl, Baarn, 1991. Riefenstahl, Leni, The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl, London, 1992. Riefenstahl, Leni, A Memoir, New York, 1993, 1995. Salkeld, Audrey, A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, London, 1997. Articles: Lewis, Marshall, in New York Film Bulletin, nos. 12–14, 1960. Gunston, D., ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1960. Muller, Robert, ‘‘Romantic Miss Riefenstahl,’’ in Spectator (Lon- don), 10 February 1961. Berson, Arnold, ‘‘The Truth About Leni,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1965. ‘‘Issue on Riefenstahl,’’ of Film Comment (New York), Winter 1965. Delahaye, Michel, ‘‘Leni and the Wolf: Interview with Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma in English (New York), June 1966. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: A Bibliography,’’ in Film Heri- tage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1969. TRIUMPH DES WILLENSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1237 Richards, Jeffrey, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: Style and Structure,’’ in Silent Picture (London), Autumn 1970. Kelman, K., ‘‘Propaganda as Vision—Triumph of the Will,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1973. Barsam, Richard, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: Artifice and Truth in a World Apart,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1973. Gunston, David, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Current Biography (New York), May 1975. Hinton, Davie, ‘‘Triumph of the Will: Document or Artifice?,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1975. O’Donnell-Stupp, Vicki, ‘‘Myth, Meaning, and Message in The Triumph of the Will,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Winter-Spring 1978. Neale, Steve, ‘‘Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle,’’ in Screen (London), no. 1, 1979. Everson, William K., in The Documentary Tradition, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 2nd edition, New York, 1979. Winston, B., ‘‘Was Hitler There? Reconsidering Triumph des Willens,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1981. ‘‘Cinema et Propaganda Issue’’ of Revue Belge du Cinema (Brus- sels), Summer 1984. Gyurey, V., ‘‘A Harmadik Birodalom es a Fuehrer ket nezopontbol,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), no. 6, 1989. McCormack, T., ‘‘The 1988 Southam Lecture: The Texts of War and the Discourse of Peace,’’ in Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 14, no. 1, 1989. Wood, R., ‘‘Fascism/Cinema,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Fall 1989. Szilagyi, A., ‘‘Hitler Adolf szupersztar,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 1, 1990. Foldenyi, F. L., ‘‘A birodalmi szepseg buvoleteben,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 12, 1991. Doherty, Thomas, ‘‘The Filmmaker as Fascist,’’ in Boston Globe, 13 December 1992. Elsaesser, T., ‘‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), February 1993. Schwartzman, R.J., ‘‘Racial Theory and Propaganda in Triumph of the Will,’’ in Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, vol. 18, 1993. Soussloff, C.M., and B. Nichols, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: The Power of the Image,’’ in Discourse (Detroit), vol. 18.3, Spring 1996. Hitchens, Gordon, ‘‘Recent Riefenstahl Activities and a Commentary on Nazi Propaganda Filmmaking,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Riefenstahl, Leni, ‘‘After a Half-Century, Leni Riefenstahl Confronts the U.S.,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Winston, Brian, in History Today, vol. 47, no. 1, January 1997. *** Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is one of the greatest examples of film propaganda ever made. Commissioned by Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl recorded the 1934 Nuremberg National Socialist Party rally, transforming it through innovative editing, montage, and lighting into a frighteningly impressive work of indoctrination. Riefenstahl maintains that the film is an accurate record of a historical event. In the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma, the director commented that: In those days one believed in something beautiful.... How could I know better than Winston Churchill, who even in 1935–36 was saying that he envied Germany its Fuhrer? . . . you will notice if you see the film today that it doesn’t contain a single reconstructed scene. Every- thing is real.... It is history. A purely ‘‘historical’’ film.What is surprising is that Riefenstahl was ap- proached at all to create the film. Given the Nazi attitude’s chauvinistic attitude towards women—that they should act as wives and mothers before anything else—the fact that Hitler retained a female director to make such an important work is very interesting. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, hated Riefenstahl, and according to the director made filming Triumph des Willens as difficult as possible. The film was viewed as an essential and important propaganda tool. The recent Rohm Purge which had resulted in the assassination of Ernst Rohm, head of the Sturmabteilung (S.A. or brownshirts), and his top men, on 30 June 1930 had effected Nazi morale. The S.A. was responsible for maintaining order at rallies, and controlling political opposition. Hitler had a major distrust of the S.A. leaders and of the German military, whom he felt was dominated by the aristocracy. Rohm’s murder divided the Nazi Party, who were unsure about Hitler’s political direction. The film thus served as an important way of conveying to the world the Party’s unity, and strength in the light of recent disruptions. Out of the 96 propaganda films produced during 1933–45 by Goebbels’s ministry, Riefenstahl’s two films Triumph des Willens and the very beautiful Olympiad have proved the most interesting examples and the most influential works on post-war cinema. The importance of this period to the Nazi Party is shown from the opening statement of the film: September 4, 1934. 20 years after the outbreak of World War I, 16 years after German woe and sorrow began, 19 months after the beginning of Germany’s rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful admirers. The aerial shot which tracks Hitler’s arrival in his plane, and pans over the cheering crowds, military columns, and houses, focusing on a few happy, almost brainwashed looking people, creates the feeling that Hitler is a god descending from the heavens. This is emphasized by the shooting of scenes featuring Hitler from below using a low camera, which establishes the impression that the Fuhrer is an Olympian creature, larger than life. In contrast the cheering masses are shot from above, signifying that they are Hitler’s minions—and are inferior to the Fuhrer. The film’s recurrent use of symbols: the swastika; the eagle; and flags, among them, help to control the audience by making it feel that it is participating in the action occurring on screen. The eagle, the symbol of the Party is most often seen silhouetted against the sky— again showing that the force and strength of the Party is divine. Riefenstahl continuously intercuts images, alleviating the tedious- ness of the Party officials’ speeches; emphasizing important words and phrases with relevant images. This technique is gleaned from Soviet propaganda films, particularly from the work of Eisenstein and TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1238 Pudovkin, and is effective in retaining the audience’s interest. The use of montage is also important because what the viewer sees on screen is a carefully created image rather than a natural reality. The film emphasizes the god-like status of the Fuhrer; the impor- tance of the Volk and folk history; and the military strength of the Nazis. Long sweeping shots of the Hitler Youth, the military, and the Labour Movement, symbolically carrying spades instead of rifles, show the support that the Party enjoys. Lutze, Rohm’s successor, is also promoted by the film. William L. Shirer in Berlin Diary commented that Lutze was an unpopular successor to Rohm, but in Triumph des Willens, the S.A. leader is seen being mobbed by his men. Only the Fuhrer receives the same kind of treatment in the film. To shoot the film, Riefenstahl used a team of 16 cameramen with a further 16 assistants, using a total of 30 cameras. The two-hour film is a perfectly edited document of Nazi fantacism. Accompanied by an impressively stirring soundtrack, which includes music by Wagner, Triumph des Willens is an example of how film can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate the masses. Its influence on post-war cinema has been long-lasting, and the contemporary advertising industry uses many of the techniques used to such great effect in the film to capture the minds and thoughts of the audience: the repetition of motifs, montage, and a use of emotive and stirring music to manipulate the audience. Triumph des Willens won a state award, and the Gold Medal at the Venice Bienniale of 1935, and the French Grand Prix at the film festival held in Paris. —A. Pillai TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGE (Three Colours: Blue, White, Red) Director: Krysztof Kieslowski TROIS COULEURS: BLEU France, 1993 Production: MK2 Productions SA, CED Productions, France 3 Cin- ema, CAB Productions, TOR Production, Canal Plus, Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie; colour, 35mm; running time: 98 minutes. Filmed in Paris, 1993. Producer: Marin Karmitz; screenplay: Krzysztof Pisiewicz and Krzysztof Kieslowski; photography: Slawomir Idziak; editor: Jac- ques Witta; assistant director: Emmanuel Finkiel; set design: Claude Lenoir; music: Zbigniew Preisner; sound editor: Claire Bez, Bertrand Lanclos, and Jean-Claude Laureux; sound recording: Jean- Claude Laureux, Brigitte Taillandier, and Pascal Colomb; costumes: Virginie Viard and Naima Lagrange. Cast: Juliette Binoche (Julie); Benoit Régent (Olivier); Florence Pernel (Sandrine); Charlotte Véry (Lucille); Hélène Vincent (Jour- nalist); Emanuelle Riva (Julie’s Mother); Claude Duneton (Doctor). Award: Golden Lion, Venice 1993. Publications Script: Kieslowski, Krzystof, Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White and Red, New York, 1998. Books: Campan, Véronique, Dix brèves histoires d’image: le Décalogue de Krzysztof Kieslowski, Paris, 1993. Amiel, Vincent, Kieslowski, Paris, 1995. Lubelskiego, Tadeusza, Kino Krzysztofa Kie’slowskiego, Kraków, 1997. Attolini, Vito, Krzystof Kieslowski, Manduria, 1998. Insdorf, Annette, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, New York, 1999. Articles: Nesselson, L., Variety (New York), 20 September 1993. Ostria, V., ‘‘Le hasard et l’indifférence,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1993. Peck, A., and others, Positif (Paris), September 1993. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘True Blue,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1207, 6 October 1993. Macnab, G., Sight and Sound (London), November 1993. Mensonge, S., ‘‘Three Colors Blue, White and Red: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Friends,’’ in Cinema Papers (Fitzroy), no. 99, June 1994. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘To Save the World: Kieslowski’s Three Colors Tril- ogy,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, no. 6, November- December 1994. Wall, J.M., ‘‘No Sense of the Sacred,’’ in Christian Century, vol. 112, 15 March 1995. Jean, Marcel, ‘‘Voir Rouge,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 76, Spring 1995. Toh, H.L., ‘‘Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs Trilogy: The Auteur’s Preoccupation with (Missed) Chances and (Missed) Connections,’’ in Kinema, vol. 5, Spring 1996. Pope, Angela, ‘‘In Memory,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 8, August 1996. Coates, Paul, ‘‘The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieslowski’s Trilogy,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 50, no. 2, Winter 1996–1997. Portnoy, S., ‘‘Unmasking Sound: Music and Representation in The Shout and Blue,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 17, no. 2, 1997. Wilson, Emma, ‘‘Three Colours: Blue: Kieslowski, Colour and the Postmodern Subject,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 39, no. 4, Win- ter 1998. TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1239 Trois Couleurs: Bleu TROIS COULEURS: BLANC France-Poland, 1994 Production: MK2 Productions SA, France 3 Cinema, Cab Produc- tions SA, TOR Production, with the participation of Canal Plus; colour, 35mm; running time: 92 minutes. Producer: Marin Karmitz; executive producer: Yvon Crenn; screen- play: Krzystof Piesiewicz and Krzysztof Kieslowski; photography: Edward Klosinski; editor: Urszula Lesiak; assistant directors: Teresa Violetta Buhl and Emmanuel Finkiel; art directors: Halina Dobrowolska and Claude Lenoir; music: Zbigniew Preisner; sound editors: Piotr Zawadzki, Jean-Claude Laureux, and Francine Lemaitre; sound recording: Brigitte Taillandier and Pascal Colomb; cos- tumes: Elzbieta Radke, Teresa Wardzala, Jolanta Luczak, and Virginie Viard. Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski (Karol Karol); Julette Delpy (Dominique); Janusz Gajos (Mikolaj); Jerzy Stuhr (Jurek); Grzegorz Warchol (Elegant man); Jerzy Nowak (Old Farmer); Aleksander Bardini (Lawyer); Cezary Harasimowicz (Inspector); Jerzy Trela (Monsieur Bronek). Award: Golden Bear, Berlin 1994. Publications Articles: Nesselson, L., Variety (New York), 31 January 1994. Amiel, V., ‘‘Le milieu, les origines,’’ in Positif (Paris), Febru- ary 1994. Jousse, T., ‘‘Marché noir,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Febru- ary 1994. Rayns, T., ‘‘Glowing in the Dark,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), June 1994. Strick, P., Sight and Sound (London), June 1994. Johnston, Trevor, interview with Julie Delpy, in Time Out (London), no. 1242, 8 June 1994. TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1240 Pawelczak, A., Films in Review (New York), July/August 1994. Positif (Paris), September 1994. Williams, D.E., ‘‘White,’’ in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), vol. 18, October 1994. Jean, Marcel, ‘‘Voir Rouge,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 76, Spring 1995. Pope, Angela, ‘‘In Memory,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 8, August 1996. Coates, Paul, ‘‘The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieslowski’s Trilogy,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 50, no. 2, Winter 1996–1997. Insdorf, A., ‘‘White,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, March/ April 1997. TROIS COULEURS: ROUGE France-Switzerland-Poland, 1994 Production: MK2 Productions SA, France 3 Cinema, CAB Produc- tions SA, TOR Production, in association with Canal Plus; colour, 35mm; running time: 99 minutes. Producer: Marin Karmitz; screenplay: Krzystof Kieslowski and Krzystof Piesiewicz; photography: Piotr Sobocinski; editor: Jac- ques Witta; assistant director: Emmanuel Finkiel; set design: Claude Lenoir; music: Zbigniew Preisner and Van Den Budenmayer; sound editors: Piotr Zawadski, Francine Lemaitre, Jean-Claude Laureux, and Nicolas Naegelen; costumes: Nadia Cuenoid and Véronique Michel. Cast: Irène Jacob (Valentine Dussaut); Jean-Louis Trintignant (Judge Joseph Kern); Frédérique Feder (Karin); Jean-Pierre Lorit (Auguste Bruner); Samuel Lebihan (Photographer); Marion Stalens (Veteri- nary Surgeon); Teco Celio (Barman); Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Benoit Régent, Zbigniew Zamachowski. Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 24 May 1994. Rayns, T., ‘‘Glowing in the Dark,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), June 1994. Masson, A., ‘‘La naiveté du manipulateur,’’ in Positif (Paris), Sep- tember 1994. Strauss, F. ‘‘Tu ne jouiras point,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1994. Pawelczak, Andy, ‘‘Red,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 46, no. 3–4, March-April 1995. Jean, Marcel, ‘‘Voir Rouge,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 76, Spring 1995. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 181, November/December 1995. Pope, Angela, ‘‘In Memory,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 8, August 1996. Rudolph, E., ‘‘Ransom Ups the Ante,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 77, November 1996. Coates, Paul, ‘‘The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieslowski’s Trilogy,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 50, no. 2, Winter 1996–1997. *** The thematics of Krysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy, Trois Couleurs (Three Colours), it seems, could hardly be more explicit—the colours of the French flag and the three cardinal principles of the French state: liberté, égalité, fraternité. However, when asked in an interview whether the trilogy’s structure was not simply a pretext, in the same way that the Ten Commandments provided an overall grid for his Dekalog, Kieslowski replied: ‘‘Yes, exclusively that.’’ There may be a degree of provocation to this reply, but it also pinpoints an important aspect of the trilogy. The tripartite structure is indeed a little too schematic to ring true, but it serves an important purpose in inviting the viewer to read the work for continuities and substantive thematic content that might not otherwise be apparent either in each episode or in the trilogy as a whole. Certain recurring themes suggest themselves more immediately than others in the trilogy. All three films are about people separated from those they love, or from the world; all are about communication, about language, and about transactions of various kinds. All three invoke the presence of the law in various forms: civic law, as well as moral and spiritual principles. The tricolor motif might lead us to identify this as the trilogy’s key theme, implying a comparative analysis of the three principles in secular and transcendental terms. Yet there is no a priori reason to assume that these meanings are more important than any other ones, and nothing precludes us finding other tripartite structures: the films could, for example, be seen as essays on the three senses that dominate each film: sight (Blue), touch (in the sense of possession, in White), and hearing (Red). If the trilogy encourages such varied speculation, it is because it operates more by discontinuity than by the self-enclosed unity that the title suggests. Kieslowski has characterised it as less a triptych and more a set of three individual stories assembled in one volume. The stories, and the ways they are told, are very different, making the trilogy more open to varied readings than the Dekalog, with its single location and recurring characters. Each story bears a slightly different narrative relation to its main theme. In the unremittingly sombre Blue, a young woman seeks freedom from the world after the death of her husband and child, but is recalled to it by contact with other people, and by the echoes of her husband’s music. In Blanc—universally received by critics as a comedy—a Polish hairdresser divorced by his French wife returns home and revenges himself on her by becoming a successful black marketeer, thereby ‘‘getting even’’ as a cynical illustration of equality. More obscurely, Red’s story of fraternity concerns a young woman’s chance encounter with an embittered judge; in an inversion of Blue, she restores him to society, from which he had distanced himself by adopting the god-like position of a cynical, omniscient observer. Fraternity here seems to be the interconnectedness of mortals, unknowingly caught in the machina- tions of a supercilious deity. The threads of narrative continuity between episodes are ostenta- tiously tenuous and artificial. In Blue, Julie walks into a courtroom; in TROIS COULEURS: BLEU, BLANC, ROUGEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1241 White, it turns out that she has walked in on the divorce of Karol and Dominique. In the flourish of closure that ends Red, the trilogy’s otherwise unrelated central couples are united as survivors of a cross- channel ferry disaster. In addition, the music of an apocryphal Dutch composer, van den Budenmayer, refers us to the universe of La Double Vie de Véronique (there is no reason why we shouldn’t imagine Irène Jacob’s character Valentine to be a third incarnation of that film’s parallel heroines). Other unifying threads suggest that it is futile to look for coher- ence of a realist variety, and that the trilogy’s narrative unity is purely an effect of imagery. In all three episodes, and in different cities, an old woman struggles with a bottle bank; Valentine, the embodiment of spontaneous caritas, closes this circle by helping her. In Red, such parallelism verges on the supernatural, with Kern’s life story mirrored by the younger judge Auguste. Again, this uncanny aspect is simply the effect of an arbitrary narrative manipulation; rather than staging a flashback to Kern’s youth, Kieslowski has that past happen to another character, in what he calls a ‘‘contemporary flashback.’’ Such narrative flaunting of parallelism fulfills a classic function of coincidence that at once satisfies our desire for closure, and at the same time unsettles us by presenting us with a universe that is more implausibly coherent than any universe could be. Depending on our willingness, or otherwise, to see through such artifice, we can read the films’ structure of coincidence either as a providential order in which everything—that is to say, nothing—is accidental, or as bare-faced string-pulling by a cavalier author. Red dramatises this very opposi- tion in the figure of Kern, who moves from the position of an omniscient but distanced god, eavesdropping on the world from his Geneva eyrie, to that of a manipulative ‘‘director’’ who apparently orchestrates the film’s final coup de théatre on the ferry. Extrapolated onto the level of a world view, such ambivalent coincidence leaves us free to decide whether the trilogy posits a hopelessly contingent fictional universe or one in which all loose ends reassuringly join up. The look of the films also militates against a too-obvious sense of unity. All three are shot by different cinematographers, are visually unlike each other, and each uses its dominant colour in a different way. Blue permeates the first film’s lighting as well as appearing in discrete objects, while in the third, red objects stand out against a neutral framework, without the uncanny stridency of the blue ones; red is simply a thread of colour holding this world together, just as the film’s tracking shots unite diverse characters. White, on the other hand, is dominated by a prosaic drabness, with white appearing as an absence of colour; white flashes appear on screen, suggesting the brief ecstasy of orgasm and marriage, but largely the neutrality of white means that we are free to look for it anywhere on screen—in snow, cars, paper, the sky—without being directed to see it, and without having its significance imposed on us. The trilogy’s immensely seductive quality does result in part from its over-stimulation of our visual attention. Kieslowski encourages us to constantly look for the significance of the objects he shows us, but his gauzy, decorative way of shooting a lampshade or a disordered table-top do not reveal them with the matter-of-fact analytic scrutiny of a Bresson. Rather, he overloads them with visual aura, so that we cannot help being aware that their function is to signify; Zbigniew Preisner’s often portentous music tends to overstress the point. Rarely are films so prodigal with their epiphanies. In Blue especially, the camera constantly invests its, and our, attention in movements and in proximity, as when Julie trails her hand along a wall and the camera trails along with her at wall-level, or in the close-up that reveals a minuscule feather (Blue takes such poetic miniaturisation to un- precedented extremes). Even while the narrative encourages us to maintain an Olympian detachment, the camera rarely allows us to remain outside things. The result of such heavily signposted attention to the external world is to make us anxious that we might be missing the meaning of an object—or, in a more abstract sense, its presence— and therefore missing a piece of the puzzle. This treatment precludes the possibility that a lampshade may be just a lampshade. Alterna- tively, an image’s meaning can be too brutally transparent, like the television footage of a bungee-jumper in Blue—at once free-falling and attached, too transparent a figure of Julie’s own ambivalent suspension. The trilogy is as much struck with the ‘‘glamour’’ of objects as it is with that of its leading actresses, who are very much objectified as complementary incarnations of some sort of feminine mystique. They are all curiously impassive, even when active: Julie a cool blue madonna of wounded isolation; Dominique a brutal example of the chilly attractions of the West; and Valentine quite explicitly the embodiment of warmth, alertness to the moment and—as it says on the chewing-gum billboard she poses for—‘‘fra?cheur de vivre’’ (‘‘a breath of life,’’ says the sub-title). They are there less to be empathised with than to be marvelled at and then contemplated as inimitable presences. For the viewer, there is a somewhat factitious appeal to the act of visual contemplation in these films. Kieslowski always allows us to know something that the characters don’t, thereby giving us at least the illusion of privileged distance. At the start of Blue, a close-up under the family’s car gives us a warning that it will crash a moment later. By constantly granting us such flashes of insight, Kieslowski leads us to infer an overall scheme in which even the most apparently random image finds its place. From there it is a short step to inferring a metaphysical order. This perhaps is the secret of the trilogy’s appeal—what we might call its theological fallacy. ‘‘Something important is happening around me,’’ says Valentine, and we too are inclined to believe that something important is happening before our eyes. These films shamelessly flatter our sensitivity to cosmic significance. Much of their popularity may be due to the way that they encourage us to make our own associations and inferences; yet this apparent freedom is very much determined by the presence of so many heavily charged signposts. Everything in the trilogy signifies so unceasingly that we never feel as invigoratingly adrift as we do in the world of Antonioni, say, where things signify in the first instance because they so intransigently refuse to yield their meaning. Kieslowski’s objects are never autonomous, but always significant, magical—which is to say, tied to human significance. The apparently sapient look to camera of the wounded dog in Red is an extreme example of this, where the camera’s investment in the non-human world verges on anthropomorphism. None of this is meant to deny the trilogy’s fascination, and indeed originality, only to acknowledge how problematic it is. It might seem churlish and paradoxical to attack the films on the grounds that they are over-stimulating, but Kieslowski seems unwilling to provide the viewer with any gaps that are not already orchestrated. In this sense, the visually blank White, the only episode not imbued with some sense of the uncanny, is also the only one that allows us to form our own position towards the drama. Three Colours has been received by critics and audiences alike as a statement of faith in the regenerative possibilities of a traditional TROUBLE IN PARADISE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1242 strain of European art-house cinema; but it is perhaps only the contingent circumstances of their international funding that truly makes them a statement about the current condition of Europe. (White, indeed, could be seen as a sort of picaresque allegory of a Polish film-maker’s attempt to find the right country in which to make good.) And the portentous fanfare for a unified Europe, written by Julie and her husband in Blue, invokes the spiritual importance of high culture in a way that verges on kitsch. It is in their evocation of banal daily hustling—not quite pop culture perhaps, but a more prosaic real—that the films are most affecting. Time will tell whether Kieslowski will continue to be regarded on the ‘‘art cinema’’ circuit with the spurious reverence due to an austere metaphysician, or whether he will be given proper credit as the consummate manipulator and sleight-of-hand artist that Three Colours reveals him to be—a filmmaker who could make remarkably complex and evocative capital out of the contingent facts of his chosen ‘‘pretext.’’ —Jonathan Romney TROUBLE IN PARADISE USA, 1932 Director: Ernst Lubitsch Production: Paramount; black and white; running time: 80 minutes (some sources list 86 minutes); length: 7,200 feet. Released 1932. Producer: Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, adapted by Grover Jones from the play, The Honest Finder by Laszlo Aladar; photography: Victor Milner; sets: Hans Dreier; music: W. Franke Harling. Cast: Herbert Marshall (Gaston Monescu/Gaston Laval/The Baron); Miriam Hopkins (Lily, alias the Countess); Kay Francis (Mariette Colet); Edward Everett Horton (Fran?ois); Charlie Ruggles (The Major); C. Aubrey Smith (Adolf J. Giron); Robert Craig (Jacques, the Manservant); Leonid Kinskey (A Russian). Publications Script: Trouble in Paradise in Three Screen Comedies by Samson Raphaelson, Madison, Wisconsin, 1983. Books: Jacobs, Lewis, The Rise of the American Film, New York, 1939. Huff, Theodore, An Index to the Films of Ernst Lubitsch, Lon- don, 1947. Verdone, Mario, Ernst Lubitsch, Lyons, 1964. Weinberg, Herman, The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, London and New York, 1968; 3rd edition, 1977. Mast, Gerald, The Comic Mind, New York, 1973; revised edition, Chicago, 1979. Baxter, John, The Hollywood Exiles, New York, 1976. Poague, Leland, The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: The Hollywood Films, London, 1977. Carringer, R., and B. Sabath, Ernst Lubitsch: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1978. Paul, William, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, New York, 1983. Prinzler, Hans Helmut, and Enno Patalas, editors, Lubitsch, Munich, 1984. Bourget, Eithne and Jean-Loup, Lubitsch; ou, La Satire romanesque, Paris, 1987. Harvey, James, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, New York, 1987, 1998. Nacache, Jacqueline, Lubitsch, Paris, 1987. Bowman, Barbara, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler, New York, 1992. Hake, Sabine, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, Princeton, 1992. Spaich, Herbert, Ernst Lubitsch und seine Filme, Munich, 1992. Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, New York, 1993, 2000. Salotti, Marco, Ernst Lubitsch, Recco, 1997. Henry, Nora, Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder, Westport, 2000. Articles: New York Times, 9 November 1932. Variety (New York), 15 November 1932. New Statesman (London), 24 December 1932. Wollenberg, H. H., ‘‘2 Masters: Ernst Lubitsch and Sergei Eisenstein,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1948. ‘‘A Tribute to Lubitsch, with a Letter in Which Lubitsch Appraises His Own Career,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August- September 1951. Cockshott, Gerald, in Newsreel (London), February 1952. ‘‘A Tribute to Lubitsch,’’ in Action! (Los Angeles), November- December 1967. ‘‘Lubitsch Section’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1968. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘Ernst Lubitsch: A Parallel to George Feydeau,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1970. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Lubitsch in the ‘30s,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1971–72 and Summer 1972. Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 22 July 1972. Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Fall 1975. Bond, Kirk, ‘‘Ernst Lubitsch,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 63–64, 1977. Devillers, M., in Cinématographe (Paris), September-October 1983. Ostria, V., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1983. Rabourdin, D., in Cinéma (Paris), November 1983. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), January 1984. Hosman, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1984. TROUBLE IN PARADISEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1243 Trouble in Paradise Truffaut, Fran?ois, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), March 1985. Huie, W.O., ‘‘Style and Technology in Trouble in Paradise: Evi- dence of a Technician’s Lobby?’’ in Journal of Film and Video (River Forest, Illinois), Spring 1987. Sartor, F., in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 384/385, May/ June 1989. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 453, October 1989. *** It’s no coincidence that Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch’s own favourite among his films, should also be his most elegantly amoral. Lubitsch always took delight in subverting Hollywood’s publicly professed standards of morality, and in Trouble, which sneaked through just ahead of the Hays Code, he wittily thumbed his nose at every moral precept in the book. Its characters make love without any intention—and scarcely even a mention—of marriage. No uplifting sentiments are expressed, save in situations of blatant hypocrisy; nobody is redeemed by love or suffering, nor wants to be. Crime not only pays, handsomely, but is presented as a sexy and stylish activity—and in any case hurts no one but the rich, who are either fools, or crooks themselves. ‘‘Beginnings are always difficult,’’ muses Gaston Monescu (Her- bert Marshall), preparing for an intimate supper with an attractive fellow thief. Not in this film, they’re not; from beginning to end, Trouble proceeds with seemingly effortless momentum. In the open- ing sequence a gondolier, giving a heartfelt rendition of O Sole Mio, glides along a nocturnal canal—collecting garbage; a robbery is affected in a darkened hotel room; and moments later Gaston leans pensively on his balcony, immaculate save only for a tiny leaf adhering to his sleeve. In the erotic sparring-match which follows, Lily (Miriam Hopkins) is visibly aroused by the knowledge that Gaston has just pulled off a crime, and their encounter becomes a seduction by mutual theft, each removing valuables from the other’s person like intimate articles of clothing. Throughout the film—crisply scripted by Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch’s favourite screenwriter of the sound period—sex and money are equated; wealth is erotic, illicitly acquired wealth doubly so, and larceny the finest aphrodisiac. ‘‘As far as I’m concerned,’’ says Gaston of Mme. Colet (Kay Francis), ‘‘her whole sex appeal is in that safe,’’ and Lily defines his attraction purely in terms of his TURKSIB FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1244 criminality: ‘‘I want you as a crook. I love you as a crook. I worship you as a crook.’’ With the lightest of satirical touches, Lubitsch portrays a society fuelled by luxury and greed. Barring only Hopkins, a touch too shrill in her later scenes, the casting is near impeccable; Marshall and Francis, never better, are supported by some of Holly- wood’s finest light comedians: Edward Everett Horton, Charlie Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith and, buttling imperturbably, Robert Greig. Claude Chabrol once described Fritz Lang’s films as ‘‘based on a metaphysic of architecture.’’ The same, in many ways, could be said of Lubitsch, for whom decor and props often assume hardly less importance than the actors. In Trouble doors, windows, landings, staircases are choreographed into the service of the plot; the course of an evening’s emotional intrigue can be conveyed by a succession of clock faces and off-screen dialogue. Words are often downgraded or dispensed with—scenes are played entirely in Italian, or in dumbshow behind glass—and at other times mockingly multiplied far beyond dramatic need. The wretched M. Filiba (Horton), explaining how he was robbed by a fake doctor, has his every word translated by the hotel manager for a chorus of excitable Italian policemen. Manager: ‘‘What did you talk about, M. Filiba?’’ Filiba: ‘‘About tonsils.’’ Manager (to police): ‘‘Tonsille!’’ Police (variously): ‘‘Tonsille!’’ The effect, like a verbal hall of mirrors, is to heighten the absurdity of the incident to a near-surrealist level. The film scored a triumphant success with public and critics alike. ‘‘Never again,’’ according to Andrew Sarris, ‘‘was Lubitsch to experience such rapport with his audience and his medium.’’ With censorship poised to clamp down, Trouble can be seen as the culmination of his string of erotic comedies that had begun with The Marriage Circle. Yet it also, through its influence on such directors as Cukor, McCarey, Leisen and La Cava, ushered in the golden age of Hollywood comedy. The American moviegoing public, Lubitsch had remarked on first visiting the USA in 1922, ‘‘has the mind of a twelve-year-old child; it must have life as it isn’t.’’ Nobody—and certainly not its director—would be likely to claim Trouble in Paradise as a faithful record of ‘‘life as it is.’’ But if, in the intervening ten years, the moviegoing public—or at any rate a size- able sector of it—had matured enough to relish a somewhat more sophisticated brand of unreality, Lubitsch himself can claim a major share of the credit. —Philip Kemp TURKSIB USSR, 1929 Director: Victor Turin Production: Vostok Film (USSR); black and white; 35mm; running time: 85 minutes. Released 1929. Filmed in Turkestan and Siberia. Producer: Victor Turin; screenplay: Victor Turin with Alexander Macheret, Victor Shklovsky, and Efim Aron; English titles: John Grierson; assistant director: Efim Aron; photography: Yevgeni Slavinski and Boris Frantzisson; editor of English version: John Grierson. Publications Books: Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Article: Coldicutt, K. J., ‘‘Turksib: Building a Railroad,’’ in The Documen- tary Tradition, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 2nd edition, New York, 1979. ‘‘A aldeia do pecado: Turksib,’’ in Celuloide, no. 303–305, Novem- ber 1980. Film (London), no. 105, April/May 1982. *** Turksib is a world-famous documentary that depicts the building of a railway linking Turkestan with Siberia, to carry cotton from the former in exchange for cereals and vegetables from the latter: one of its very first large-scale construction projects in the Soviet Union. Victor Turin, its director, had spent his formative years in the United States—from 1912 when he was 17 until he returned to Russia in 1922—having attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as an actor and scenarist at the Vitagraph Studios in Holly- wood. He had also, of course, missed both the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which, together with his rich, middle-class background, may have adversely affected his later career. Before Turksib, Turin had already made three Soviet films, one of which was a feature about the class struggle in the capitalist world— Borba Gigantov (Battle of Giants). It was considered too ‘‘abstract’’ (i.e., bad). It was all the more surprising, therefore, that Turin broke away from the very romantic style then becoming popular, full of dingleberry (an old Hollywood term for foliage introduced into the top of the frame), diffusion, back-lighting, noble close-ups and a general obsession with beautiful photography. In stark contrast, Turksib was a clear, direct and realistic statement, which was also gripping, touched with humor and humanity and edited with verve and a sure sense of rhythm. It was also said by Soviet critics to be ‘‘lyrical’’ (i.e., good). Perhaps (as frequently happens in cinema history) it was even helped by a relatively small budget and tight schedule to achieve its clarity, economy and unity—and to escape too much interference from ‘‘above.’’ But it was Turin himself who had carefully and deliberately planned the style and content of his film. It was received abroad with even more acclaim than it won at home, and it certainly helped to put the documentary tradition back on the rails of realism. Turksib is still enjoyable to watch and deserves the permanent place it has won in the canon of Russian classical movies, along with the works of Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov. Why did its director fail to make further masterpieces? It is difficult to determine whether Turin was rewarded—or merely ‘‘kicked up- stairs’’—by being given an executive post at the very moment he seemed to have ‘‘arrived.’’ He was not to direct another film until 1938—Bakintsy, a feature about the 1905 revolution, made at the Azerbaijani studios in Baku. Turksib undoubtedly proved Turin’s abilities as an organizer, but it seems tragic that his other, rarer talents TWELVE ANGRY MENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1245 Turksib were not given a chance for further documentaries in his fresh, purposeful style. —Robert Dunbar TWELVE ANGRY MEN USA, 1957 Director: Sidney Lumet Production: Orion-Nova (Fonda-Rose); black and white; running time: 96 minutes; length: 8,648 feet. Released February 1957. Producers: Henry Fonda, Reginald Rose; associate producer: George Justin; screenplay: Reginald Rose; photography: Boris Kaufman; editor: Carl Lerner; sound: James A. Gleason; art director: Robert Markell; music: Kenyon Hopkins. Cast: Henry Fonda (Juror no. 8); Lee J. Cobb (Juror no. 3); Ed Begley (Juror no. 10); E. G. Marshall (Juror no. 4); Jack Warden (Juror no. 7); Martin Balsam (Juror no. 1); John Fielder (Juror no. 2); Jack Klugman (Juror no. 5); Rudy Bond (Judge); James A. Kelly (Guard); Bill Nelson (Court Clerk); John Savoca (Defendant). Publications Script: Rose, Reginald, Twelve Angry Men, in Film Scripts 2, edited by George P. Garrett and others, New York, 1971. Books: Perkins, W. H., Learning the Liveliest Art, Hobart, 1968. Springer, John, The Fondas: The Films and Careers of Henry, Jane, and Peter Fonda, New York, 1970. Kerbel, Michael, Henry Fonda, New York, 1975. TWELVE ANGRY MEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1246 Twelve Angry Men Bowles, Stephen, Sidney Lumet: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Fonda, Henry, and Howard Teichmann, Fonda: My Life, New York, 1981. Goldstein, Norm, Henry Fonda: His Life and Work, London, 1982. Thomas, Tony, The Films of Henry Fonda, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1983. Roberts, Allen, and Max Goldstein, Henry Fonda: A Biography, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1984. Cunningham, Frank R., Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision, Lexington, 1991. Sweeney, Kevin, Henry Fonda: A Bio-Bibliography, New York, 1992. Boyer, Jan, Sidney Lumet, Old Tappan, 1993. Articles: Film Culture (New York), no. 2, 1957. Variety (New York), 27 February 1957. Kine Weekly (London), 25 April 1957. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1957. Hill, D., ‘‘Press Conference,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Sum- mer 1957. Truffaut, Fran?ois, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1957. Positif (Paris), February 1958. ‘‘Le Point de vue du metteur en scène,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1959. Bogdanovich, Peter, ‘‘An Interview with Sidney Lumet,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1960. Springer, John, ‘‘Henry Fonda,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1960. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Fonda,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1962. ‘‘Fonda on Fonda,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1963. Hagen, R., ‘‘Fonda: Without a Method,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1966. Petrie, Graham, ‘‘The Films of Sidney Lumet: Adaptation as Art,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1967–68. ‘‘Dialogue on Film: Henry Fonda,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), May 1977. ‘‘Sidney Lumet Issue’’ of Cinématographe (Paris), January 1982. American Film (Washington, D.C.), January-February 1982. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1247 Cunningham, F., ‘‘Sidney Lumet’s Humanism: The Return to the Father in Twelve Angry Men,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 14, no. 2, 1986. Elia, Maurice, in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 188, January-Febru- ary 1997. *** Bought and produced by Henry Fonda as a vehicle for himself (from an earlier TV study of a jury by Reginald Rose), Twelve Angry Men can be characterized as a classic liberal response to the McCarthyist assault on American pluralism and tolerance which had scarred the country in the previous decade. In taking up issues of the defence of individual rights and ideals of justice, Twelve Angry Men shares common ground with other films of the period, such as Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) and Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). Though all studies of the roots and effects of victimization in American society, their expositions differ in their perspective. Spencer Tracy’s Macreedy in Black Rock arrives as a lone avenger after the event, intent on laying bare and punishing, while Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront marks the victim himself fighting back. Fonda’s juror 8 in Twelve Angry Men is neither. Where Macreedy is akin to a surgeon resorting to the knife in cutting out a cancerous tumour and Brando is a struggling fighter battering a way forward, Fonda is almost passive. He is a healer undermining the cancer before it can take effect. Where Brando and Tracy take centre stage in action, Fonda assumes the role of catalyst, persuading others into action in an almost ‘‘de-starred’’ role, effectively unnoticed by the camera until the moment he raises his hand as the sole ‘‘Not Guilty’’ voter. Yet Twelve Angry Men is not so much a film about individual character—it is rather a probing of ideals in a country built upon the idea of active citizenship. The jurors function precisely as representa- tives of the American people in the pursuit of Justice (here added to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness), a multi-bodied American Everyman: the sports-fanatic, the former slum-kid, the Swiss-Ger- man immigrant, the educated doctor, the advertising man, the self- made businessmen, the bigot. As symbolic representatives, even names are unnecessary. The film’s subject is made explicit in the opening pan up the pillars of the courts to show the proclamation engraved above the entrance: the subject is the practice of Justice as a foundation of America-as- concept. Yet these ideals are offered precisely as they are not abstract concepts. Fonda’s function in the film is almost Socratic, testing his fellow citizens in their practice of the duties which uphold democ- racy. The trial of an accused is simply a broader trial of the function- ing of America as democracy. The film peels the jury apart in search of a common bedrock, and the revelation of threats to true democracy. From an over-concern with leisure (the sports fan’s tickets for the game), empty images (the advertising man with no point of view), to outright bigotry (juror 10’s McCarthyist ‘‘these people are dangerous’’ outburst near the end functioning as a revelation of naked prejudice that is pointedly ignored by a jury finally refinding its democratic soul), the threats are revealed and overcome. And it is important that is it those arguably closest to the spirit of the American ideal—the ‘‘poor, tired and homeless’’—who first take juror 8’s cue to defend it. In particular, it is the immigrant juror 11 who makes the link between the jury and democracy, the practice and the ideal, reminding America of its promise. A beautifully precise construction in narrative terms, Twelve Angry Men handles a potentially clichéd situation with superb assur- ance. From a full set of excellent performances, Fonda as the quiet architect achieves a humbling serenity, while Lee J. Cobb’s acid juror 3 echoes his role in On the Waterfront. The film also blends both a formal visual control—as in the framing of groups to emphasize sways of power within the jury process with a certain cinematic ‘‘looseness’’ that moves towards Naturalism, with actors wandering in and out of frame, speech from off-camera and overlapping dialogue. Yet, arguably, it is a film of ideas and emotions more than style, an idealist film in a cynical world. It reaches toward a less tainted humanity, either on the grand scale of a Nation (to which the jurors go out at the end, recharged) or the smaller—but not lesser—scale of juror 3’s rediscovery of the quality of mercy which culminates the jury’s reaching a verdict. Kazan’s opening to On the Waterfront appeals to ‘‘right-thinking people in a vital democracy.’’ Twelve Angry Men echoes this appeal as a foundation of the vision of America. —Norman Miller THE TWISTED ROAD See THEY LIVE BY NIGHT TWO ACRES OF LAND See DO BIGHA ZAMIN TWO ROADS See DUVIDHA TWO STAGE SISTERS See WUTAI JIEMEI 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY USA-UK, 1968 Director: Stanley Kubrick Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp.; Technicolor and Metrocolor, 35mm, Super Panavision; running time: 141 min- utes, premiere versions were 160 minutes. Released 3 April 1968, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1248 2001: A Space Odyssey New York. Filmed beginning 29 December 1965 in MGM’s Shepperton and Borehamwood Studios, England. Cost: $10,500,000. Producers: Stanley Kubrick with Victor Lyndon; screenplay: Stan- ley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, from ‘‘The Sentinel’’ in Expedition to Earth by Clarke; photography: Geoffrey Unsworth; additional photography: John Alcott; editor: Ray Lovejoy; sound supervisor: A. W. Watkins; sound mixer: H. J. Bird, sound editor: Winston Ryder; production designers: Tony Masters, Harry Lange, and Ernest Archer; art director: John Hoesli; music: from works by Khatchaturian, Ligeti, Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss; special effects director: Stanley Kubrick; supervisors: Wally Veevers, Douglas Trumbull, Con Pederson and Tom Howard; costume de- signer: Hardy Amies; scientific consultant: Frederick Ordway III. Cast: Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman); Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole); William Sylvester (Dr. Heywood Floyd); Daniel Richter (Moon- Watcher); Leonard Rossiter (Smyslov); Margaret Tyzack (Elena); Robert Beatty (Halvorsen); Sean Sullivan (Michaels); Douglas Rain (HAL’s voice); Frank Miller (Mission Control); Penny Brahms (Stew- ardess); Alan Gifford (Poole’s Father). Awards: Oscar for Special Visual Effects, 1968; American Film Institute’s ‘‘100 Years, 100 Movies,’’ 1998. Publications Script: Clarke, Arthur C., 2001: A Space Odyssey, New York, 1968. Books: Agel, Jerome, editor, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, New York, 1970. Dumont, Jean-Paul, and Jean Monod, La Foetus astral, Paris, 1970. Predal, Rene, Le Cinéma fantastique, Paris, 1970. Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick Directs, London, 1971. Clarke, Arthur C., The Lost Worlds of 2001, New York, 1972. Clarke, Arthur C., Report on Planet 3: And Other Speculations, New York, 1972. De Vries, Daniel, The Films of Stanley Kubrick, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1973. Geduld, Carolyn, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Phillips, Gene D., Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, New York, 1975. Ciment, Michel, Kubrick, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1987; English edition, London, 1983. Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1249 Short, Robert, The Gospel from Outer Space, San Francisco, 1983. Dettmering, P., Literatur, Psychoanalyse, Film: Aufs?tze 1978 bis 1983, Stuttgart, 1984. Hummel, Christoph, editor, Stanley Kubrick, Munich, 1984. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Stanley Kubrick: Tempo, spazio, storia, e mondi possibili, Parma, 1985. Cagin, Seth, Born to Be Wild: Hollywood & the Sixties Generation, Boca Raton, 1994. Articles: Clarke, Arthur C., ‘‘The Sentinel,’’ in Expedition to Earth (New York), 1953. Crist, Judith, ‘‘Stanley Kubrick, Please Come Down,’’ in New York, 22 April 1962. Robinson, David, ‘‘Two for the Sci-Fi,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Spring 1966. ‘‘Kubrick, Farther Out,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 12 Septem- ber 1966. Spinrad, Norman, ‘‘Stanley Kubrick in the 21st Century,’’ in Cinema (Beverley Hills), December 1966. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Stanley Kubrick,’’ in The American Cinema (New York), 1968. Adler, Renata, in New York Times, 4 April 1968. Shuldiner, Herbert, ‘‘How They Filmed 2001,’’ in Popular Science (New York), June 1968. Trumbull, Douglas, ‘‘Creating Special Effects for 2001,’’ in Ameri- can Cinematographer (Los Angeles), June 1968. Barker, Cliff, and Mark Gasser, in Cineaste (New York), Sum- mer 1968. Hunter, Tim, and others, in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Sum- mer 1968. Austen David, in Films and Filming (London), July 1968. Tavernier, Bertrand, ‘‘Londres a l’heure de Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 21 August 1968. Capdenac, Michel, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), October 1968. Ciment, Michel, in Positif (Paris), October 1968. Walter, Renaud, ‘‘Entretien avec Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Positif (Paris), December 1968. Alpert, Hollis, in Film 68–69, edited by Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris, New York, 1969. Rapf, Maurice, ‘‘A Talk with Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Action! (Los Angeles), January-February 1969. Eisenschitz, Bernard, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1969. Michelson, Annette, ‘‘Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,’’ in Artforum (New York), February 1969. James, Clive, ‘‘Kubrick Versus Clarke,’’ in Cinema (London), March 1969. Sineux, Michel, in Positif (Paris), April 1969. McKee, Mel, ‘‘2001: Out of the Silent Planet,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1969. Gelmis, Joseph, ‘‘Stanley Kubrick,’’ in The Film Director as Super- star (New York), 1970. Kael, Pauline, ‘‘Trash, Art, and the Movies,’’ in Going Steady, Boston, 1970. Youngblood, Gene, ‘‘The New Nostalgia,’’ in Expanded Cinema (New York), 1970. Sargow, Michael, in Film Society Review (New York), January 1970. Pohl, Frederick, in Film Society Review (New York), February 1970. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times, 3 May 1970. Daniels, Don, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1970–71. Kozloff, Max, in Film Culture (New York), Winter-Spring 1970. Kauffman, Stanley, in Figure of Light (New York), 1971. Phillips, Gene, ‘‘Kubrick,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1971–72. ‘‘Issue on 2001’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Summer 1972. Fisher, J., ‘‘Too Bad Lois Lane: The End of Sex in 2001,’’ in Film Journal (New York), September 1972. Boyd, D., ‘‘Mode and Meaning in 2001,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington D.C.), no. 3, 1978. Kuckza, P., in Filmkultura (Budapest), March-April 1979. ‘‘Le Dossier: 2001, Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 July 1979. Hibbin, N., in Chaplin (Stockholm), no. 6, 1981. Burgoyne, Robert, ‘‘Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1981-Spring 1982. Rood, J., in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1983. Strick, Philip, ‘‘Ring Round the Moons,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1985. Shelton, R., ‘‘Rendezvous with HAL: 2001/2010,’’ in Extrapolation (Kent, Ohio), no. 3, 1987. Carter, S., ‘‘Avatars of the Turtles,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, DC), no. 3, 1990. Fantauzzi, S., in Quaderni di Cinema (Florence), July-September 1992. Hanson, E., ‘‘Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,’’ in Screen (Oxford), no. 2, 1993. Debellis, J., ‘‘‘The Awful Power’: John Updike’s Use of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in Rabbit Redux,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1993. Vallerand, Fran?ois, ‘‘L’odyssée de la musique de 2001,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), January 1994. Miller, Mark Crispin, ‘‘2001: a Cold Descent,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), January 1994. Henderson, K., ‘‘Alex North’s 2001 and Beyond,’’ in Soundtrack (Mechelen), March 1994. Jacquet-Fran?illon, Vincent, ‘‘An Interview with Jerry Goldsmith,’’ in Cue Sheet (Hollywood), vol. 10, no. 3–4, 1993–1994. Saada, Nicolas, ‘‘Caro Diario,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1994. Sinema, Andere, ‘‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ in Andere Sinema (Antwerp), May-June 1997. Chion, M., ‘‘(Deux) 2001: l’Odyssee de l’espace,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1997. Scheurer, Timothy E., ‘‘Kubrick vs. North. The Score for 2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 1998. *** In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick further explored his dark vision of man in a materialistic, mechanistic age depicted in Dr. Strangelove four years earlier. In explaining how the original idea for this landmark science-fiction film came to him, he says, ‘‘Most astronomers and other scientists interested in the whole question are strongly convinced that the universe is crawling with life; much of it, since the numbers are so staggering, (is) equal to us in intelligence, or superior, simply because human intelligence has existed for so relatively short a period.’’ He approached Arthur C. Clarke, whose science fiction short story, ‘‘The Sentinel,’’ would eventually become the basis for the film. They first expanded the short story into a novel, TYSTNADEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1250 in order to completely develop the story’s potential, and then turned that into a screenplay. MGM bought their package and financed the film for six million dollars, a budget that after four years of work on the film eventually rose to ten million. Though 2001 opened to indifferent and even hostile reviews, subsequent critical opinion has completely reversed itself. As the film is often revived, it has earned back its original cost several times over. 2001 begins with the dawn of civilization in which an ape-man learns to use a bone as a weapon in order to destroy a rival, ironically taking a step further toward humanity. As the victorious ape-man throws his weapon spiralling into the air, there is a dissolve to a spaceship from the year 2001. ‘‘It’s simply an observable fact,’’ Kubrick comments, ‘‘that all of man’s technology grew out of the discovery of the tool-weapon. There’s no doubt that there’s a deep emotional relationship between man and his machine-weapons, which are his children. The machine is beginning to assert itself in a very profound way, even attracting affection and obsession.’’ This concept is dramatized in the film when astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole find themselves at the mercy of the computer HAL 9000, which controls their spaceship. (There are repeated juxtapositions of man with his human failings and fallibility immersed in machines: beautiful, functional, but cold and heartless.) When HAL the computer makes a mistake, he refuses to admit the evidence of his own capacity for error, and proceeds to destroy the occupants of the space ship to cover it up. Kubrick indicates here, as in Dr. Strangelove, that human fallibility is less likely to destroy man than the abdication of his moral responsibilities to presumably infallible machines. Kubrick believes man must also strive to gain mastery over himself and not just over his machines, ‘‘Somebody said man is the missing link between primitive apes and civilized human beings. You might say that that is inherent in the story of 2001 too. We are semi- civilized, capable of cooperation and affection, but needing some sort of transfiguration into a higher form of life. Since the means to obliterate life on earth exists, it will take more than just careful planning and reasonable cooperation to avoid some eventual cata- strophic event. The problem exists as long as the potential exists; and the problem is essentially a moral one and a spiritual one.’’ These sentiments are very close to those which Charlie Chaplin expressed in his closing speech in The Great Dictator: ‘‘We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.’’ The overall implications of the film suggest a more optimistic aspect to Kubrick’s view of life than had been previously detected in his work. Here he presents man’s creative encounters with the universe and his unfathomed potential for the future in more hopeful terms than he did, for example, in Dr. Strangelove. The film ends with Bowman, the only survivor of the mission, being reborn as ‘‘an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a super- man, if you like,’’ Kubrick explains, ‘‘returning to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.’’ Kubrick feels that ‘‘the God concept is at the heart of the film’’ since, if any extraterrestrial superior being were to manifest itself to man, the latter would immediately assume it was God or an emissary of God. When an artifact of these beings does appear in the film, it is represented as a black monolithic slab. Kubrick thought it better not to try to be too specific in depicting these beings, ‘‘You have to leave something to the audience’s imagination,’’ he concludes. In summary, 2001 by neither showing nor explaining too much, enables the viewer to experience the film as a whole. As Kubrick comments, ‘‘The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize it. I tried to create a visual experience which directly penetrates the subconscious content of the material.’’ The movie consequently becomes for the viewer an intensely subjective experience which reaches his inner consciousness in the same manner that music does, leaving him free to speculate about thematic content. As one critic put it, 2001 successfully brings the techniques and appeal of the experimental film into the studio feature-length film, ‘‘making it the world’s most expensive underground movie.’’ It is this phenomenon, in the final analysis, which has made 2001: A Space Odyssey so perennially popular with audiences. It is significant that Kubrick set the film in the year 2001, because Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking silent film Metropolis takes place in the year 2000. This reference to Lang’s film is a homage to the earlier master’s accomplishment in science fiction—an achievement which Kubrick’s film has successfully built on and surpassed. —Gene D. Phillips TYSTNADEN (The Silence) Sweden, 1963 Director: Ingmar Bergman Production: Svensk Filmindustri; black and white, 35mm; running time: 95 minutes; length: 2623 meters. Released 23 September 1963, Stockholm. Filmed sporadically from Summer 1962-Summer 1963 in Sweden. Producer: Allan Ekelund; screenplay: Ingmar Bergman; photogra- phy: Sven Nykvist; editor: Ulla Ryghe; sound engineer: Stig Flodin; production designer: P. A. Lundgren; music: Bach; special effects: Evald Anderson; costume designer: Marik Vos. Cast: Gunnel Lindblom (Anna); Ingrid Thulin (Ester); J?rgen Lindstr?m (Johan); Haakan Jahnberg (Hotel manager); Lissi Alandh (Woman in the cinema); Leif Forstenberg (Man in the cinema); Nils Waldt (Cashier at the cinema); Birgir Lesander; Eduardo Gutierrez. Publications Script: Bergman, Ingmar, Le Silence, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), May 1964; as The Silence, in A Film Trilogy, New York and London, 1967; revised edition, London, 1989. Books: Béranger, Jean, and Fran?ois Guyon, Ingmar Bergman, Lyons, 1964. Chiaretti, Tommaso, Ingmar Bergman, Rome, 1964. TYSTNADENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 1251 Donner, Jorn, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Blooming- ton, Indiana, 1964. Nelson, David, Ingmar Bergman: The Search for God, Boston, 1964. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1968. Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Wood, Robin, Ingmar Bergman, New York, 1969. Sj?gren, Henrik, Regi: Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1970. Young, Vernon, Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, New York, 1971. Bj?rkman, Stig, and others, editors, Bergman on Bergman, New York, 1973. Ranieri, Tino, Ingmar Bergman, Florence, 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart, editor, Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1975. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Ingmar Bergman and Society, San Diego, 1978. Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and the First-Person Film, Princeton, 1978. Marion, Denis, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1979. Manvell, Roger, Ingmar Bergman: An Appreciation, New York, 1980. Mosley, Philip, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, Bos- ton, 1981. Petric, Vlada, editor, Film and Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, New York, 1981. Cowie, Peter, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York, 1982. Livingston, Paisley, Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1982. Steene, Birgitta, Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Jones, William G., editor, Talking with Bergman, Dallas, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Ingmar Bergman, Paris, 1983. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham, North Carolina, 1986. Bergman, Ingmar, Laterna Magica, Stockholm, 1987; as The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, London, 1988. Cohen, James, Through a Lens Darkly, New York, 1991. Bjorkman, Stig, and Torsten Maans, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Cambridge, 1993. Cohen, Hubert I., Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York, 1993. Long, Robert Emmet, Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage, New York, 1994. Tornqvist, Egil, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, Amsterdam, 1995. Blackwell, Marilyn J., Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Rochester, 1997. Michaels, Lloyd, editor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, New York, 1999; revised edition, Cambridge, 2000. Articles: Bory, Jean-Louis, in Arts (Paris), March 1964. Interview with Bergman in Sunday Times (London), 15 March 1964. Collet, Jean, in Télérama (Paris), 18 March 1964. Sadoul, Georges, in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 26 March 1964. Billard, Pierre, in Cinéma (Paris), April 1964. Kyrou, Ado, in Positif (Paris), Summer 1964. Scott, James, ‘‘The Achievement of Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), Winter 1965. Hamilton, William, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman on the Silence of God,’’ in Motive, November 1966. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Ingmar Bergman,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), March 1969. Young, Vernon, ‘‘Cinema Borealis,’’ in Hudson Review (Nutley, New Jersey), Summer 1970. Steene, Birgitta, ‘‘Images and Words in Bergman’s Films,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1970. Alexander, W., ‘‘Devils in the Cathedral: Bergman’s Trilogy,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1974. Amis du Film et de la Télévision (Brussels), February 1976. Troelsen, A., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1978. Holloway, R., ‘‘Tystnaden som tema,’’ in Filmrutan (Stockholm), vol. 28, no. 1, 1985. Listener (London), 23 June 1988. Trasatti, S., ‘‘Bergman, il paradosso di un ‘Ateo cristiano,’’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), November-December 1991. Bergman, I., ‘‘Kepek 2,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 10, 1992. Sitney, P. A., ‘‘Bergman’s The Silence and the Primal Scene,’’ in Film Culture (New York), June 1992. Kieslowski, Krzysztof, ‘‘Kan Kieslowski l?sa Tystnadens g?ta?’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 36, no. 5, 1994. Visscher, J. De, ‘‘Gods zwijgen?’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 462, May 1996. Kieslowski, Krzysztof, ‘‘Peut-on résoudre l’énigme du ‘silence?’’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 457, March 1999. Lahr, John, ‘‘The Demon-Lover: After Six Decades in Film and Theatre, Ingmar Bergman Talks About His Family and the Inven- tion of Psychological Cinema,’’ in The New Yorker, vol. 75, no. 13, 31 May 1999. *** The Silence: there are alternative or multiple significances to that title by Ingmar Bergman. The most commonly understood is an allusion (yet again: as in The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, and Through a Glass Darkly) to the utter unresponsiveness of God to the tribula- tions of humankind, but another potential implication is the silence that follows upon non-communication, misunderstanding, and the lack of sympathy between human beings. The protagonists in this film are two sisters in their thirties—Anna, the younger (Gunnel Lindblom), with her small son Johan (J?rgen Lindstr?m), and Ester (Ingrid Thulin), who are travelling by train (the published script emphasizing its stench) to an unspecified central European country where the language is utterly unknown to them and is, indeed, an invention by Bergman. They end up in what is to be the main setting for the film—a suite of two rooms in a vast, almost unoccupied hotel in a city full of people with whom they cannot communicate and which is strangely, eerily silent. As in Persona (Bergman’s film to be released some three years later) the two women are involved in a form of love/hate intimacy which some have tried to interpret as lesbian. While Anna is full of a lust for life and sex (which she seeks out promiscuously in this strange city), Ester (forever jealous of her younger sister) is suffering from what appears to be a terminal sickness, her only faithful attendant being an elderly and cadaverous floor waiter who seems to resemble Death himself. The essence of this film lies in the failing relationship of the two sisters, who represent a polarity of opposites in temperament. Ingrid TYSTNADEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 1252 Thulin once told the writer that Bergman had considered inviting her to play both parts, thus emphasizing this polarity as dual aspects of a single person, but that the logistics of production with a single actress proved too daunting. Anna is sensual in all her contacts, even with her small son. The scenes between her and her eager lover (a man she picks up during an evening’s solitary outing) caused the censors of the early 1960s some considerable concern, though they would cause little stir today. Anna’s carnality contrasts with Ester’s lonely austerity, and her demanding rationality. She is, according to the script, a translator, and she shows throughout the film her curiosity about certain words in the country’s language, as conveyed to her by the waiter. As the elder, she attempts to dominate her sister (who is deeply resentful) and to adopt a guardian-like attitude to the boy, which makes Anna jealous. The boy himself wanders off to explore the hotel, large and empty like a mausoleum, and finds a kind of momentary, sick companionship with a party of dwarfs, creatures of his own size who are evidently a company of entertainers and virtually the only other inhabitants in the hotel. The effect of this perverse contact is somehow surreal. As for the country itself, Bergman says (Bergman on Bergman), ‘‘It’s a country preparing for war, where war can break out any day, all the time one feels it is something perverse and terrifying.’’ Every so often tanks roll through the city streets, and the sinister wail of air-raid sirens can be heard. Bergman has said much from time to time about this daunting film. In a press interview for the London Sunday Times (March 15, 1964), he said, ‘‘Ester loves her sister; she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Love must be open. Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say.’’ Some years later in Bergman on Bergman, he added, ‘‘The crux of the matter is that Ester—even though she is ill and inwardly decaying—is struggling against the decay within her. She feels a sort of disgust for Anna’s corporeality . But Anna is uninhibitedly physical. She holds her little boy within the magic circle of her own animality, con- trols him.’’ There is, however, at least the suggestion of hope at the close of the film. Anna leaves her sister to return home, taking the child with her. But the boy carries a secret message with him from his aunt in a strange language which has excited her curiosity. Ester entertains maternal feelings towards him; the message excites him as he struggles to spell it out. As Bergman puts it (Bergman on Bergman), ‘‘To me Ester in all her misery represents a distillation of something indestructibly human, which the boy inherits from her. Out of all man’s misery and conflicts and his insufferable condition is crystalized this clear little drop of something different—this sudden impulse to understand a few words in another language.’’ The boy acts as a catalyst between the two sisters; both women, adds Bergman ‘‘turn their best sides towards the kid. He escapes from the film almost unscathed.’’ Nevertheless, he carries a toy gun and has a childlike vision of flight and the space age. On its release, the film excited much hostile criticism—as anti- woman, anti-sex, as near-pornographic (partly because of Ester’s moment of masturbation). The explosive, sometimes sick erotic suggestions and action in the film are thematic, not in any way pornographic. Bergman claims to have received after the film’s release threatening or otherwise vicious letters and phonecalls, but in Bergman on Bergman he categorically rejects any of these hostile implications. The film, he says, ‘‘tells its story by simple means, not by symbols or such antics. The people in my films are exactly like myself—creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. My films draw on my own experience, however inadequately based logically and intellectually.’’ —Roger Manvell