Bullfight

If bullfighting is an art, it is an art of motion; it doesn't lend itself well to overstatement or description of any static kind. Perhaps that is why there has been so much bad writing about bullfighting. Though not a bad film, Bullfight is somewhat pretentious: it tries to cover too much material and is edited skillfully but too much.

Bullfight's pretentions should please Cambridge's legion of dining hall aficionados, for they are informational pretentions. As is written on the back of the short dictionary handed out at the door, "Bullfight is more than just a historical film; it is also a complete explanation of the meaning of bull-fighting." The complete explanation includes a sketchy history of the origins of bullfighting, a hasty description of the passes, together with brief shorts of most of this century's great matadors in action. These don't add much, except quantitatively, to the sum of the dining hall aficionado's education. The attempt to provide in convenient form the distilled essence of the meaning of bullfighting has been made before, by Gentry magazine for instance, with as little success.

While the movie is an impressive job of editing (done by someone known only as Miriam), the editing is successful only when it is less obviously educational. The sequences of the raising of bulls and the training of matadors are more subtly included in a whole which is not a single bullfight but suggests its stages.

The movie is best when it sticks to bullfighting without trying to explain it; the most exciting parts of the movie come in the unedited and continuous sequences of bullfighting. These are superb. Bryant Halliday's narration, which includes lines like, "This is the moment of supereme danger and nobility," doesn't and much to these sequences. Such an approach hides most of the humor of a bullfight. Funny things happen as much in the stands as in the arena.

If the commentary and the editing emphasize the drama of bullfighting a little unnecessarily, Bullfight is still well worth seeing. The shorts are not. One includes Spanish dances by Antonio and Rosario which are difficult to watch owing to the fact that the sets don't keep still. The other, which may appeal to Cambridge's armchair revolutionaries and bomb-throwers, includes a tornado, several hurricanes, many atom bombs, an H-bomb, and Krakatoa. It's name is Man vs. Nature.