Politics and Films for Beginners

The four years since the. Class of 1971 matriculated have been pivotal for filmmaking and film criticism.

The basic changes in accepted American channels of production are obvious: the failure of the film studios even as managerial or financial systems made the option of sale to large conglomerates irresistible. United Artists went to Transamerica, Warner-Seven Arts to Kinney Services, "Nixon-Paramount" to Gulf and Western.

And this crisis of an old order affected the product enormously. Puritan scruples lost out to Puritan money, with lots of nipples and buttocks and, by 1970, pubic hair incorporated into vile and violent attempts to recapture brutalized audiences.

At least the new, desperate openness of the film companies did allow, for a time, the chance for an art of depth to be developed, and more realistic milieus to be delineated. The Graduate or Easy Rider might have been pretty terrible movies, but their audiences were presented with types they recognized from their own experience.

And the recently ended "new era" did bring forth films which realized the promises of unmuzzled creative vision. The films of Arthur Penn. Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick honestly reflected surrounding chaos. Even if The Wild Bunch, 2001 or Little Big Man finally emphasized-through the criticism of portrayed societies-viable standards of intelligence and honor by which man could construct a sane world, they were at base level iconoclastic, determined to shatter set cultural conventions and destroy them utterly.

Films like these are rare, however. And since film companies have continued to turn a blind eye to talent and have backed hacks who lose their money, they will be even rarer in the future. Lasting change in film has, in these past years, come mainly from those individual foreign filmmakers working in radical political or aesthetic isolation.

What European and Third World filmmakers have begun is a re-questioning of the film medium itself, caused by world conditions which U.S. directors have seldom alluded to, and then in oblique fashion.

To Western audiences, the most accessible filmmaker to recognize contradictions between his themes, and his style and method is Ingmar Bergman. Although the contradictions he recognized were not political-as were those of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries-the problems he encountered illustrate an archetypal confrontation between a "self-contained" artist and social turmoil he could not avoid.

Persona arrived in 1967, Godard was first wavering in his arrogant use of collage, and the Cinema Novo movement, meant to create new expressions for emerging cultures, was largely unknown. Bergman started questioning a career based on the expression of personal psychological torments. His previous themes were tied to a consideration of man as an individual, his damning separateness. Bergman new asked: Does aesthetic tradition justify a director who uses the screen to produce a dream world and imposes his will on actors and audiences? Or does the director merely create barriers between the audience and screen characters by his personal literary superstructures? Persona was an attempt to return the director to confrontation with his subject matter, eschewing the artiness that film-the "all-purpose medium"-invites. To Bergman. this meant aiming for a goal only now fully understood: to make a film based on the human face.

In an oft-quoted sentiment, Bergman stated that he wished to work unknown, for a common ideal, as did the artisans of the cathedral at Chartres. In Persona he is faced by the self-defeat of such a hope in a world swayed by countervailing tensions each of which claims ascendance and leaves little solace or purpose to the individual. Bergman's actress-heroine is not able to portray the theatrical tragedy of Electra while horrifying war is waged in a country far distant from neutralist Sweden. Alma turns on her TV set, and the immolation of a Buddhist monk produces her own agony.

The burden for Bergman is doubled by his need to communicate the meaning of Alma's pain. Upheaval and repression sometimes go unquestioned because of the rhetorical baggage that goes with them. Bergman's way of exposing the content of human conflict is anti-ideological, but his moral anger bears latent political meaning. He reduces a state of warfare to the level of personal violence, where it can be explored in detail, and views it as the last measure to which frustrated people resort when their associations are blocked for the sake of someone's self-gratification.

As a filmmaker, Bergman humbled himself before his characters, splitting his screen and letting its images dissolve into confused fragments whenever the emotional tensions became unbearably loaded on behalf of a single individual. At film's end, ragged bits of leader flickered past the projected lamp. Bergman, at this point, can only hope to approach an image of his characters at various moments of their lives. To be honest, he must develop frameworks which not only reveal his thematic material, but-through the visible organization of his film and filmmaking-reveal how he applies it to his own life.

Hour of the Wolf, his next film, seemed a throwback, a last effort to exorcise personal demons in a traditional story film. But the subsequent Shame is a vision completely externalized. The film begins in darkness; an alarm clock rings, bedroom shades are thrown open, and until the portrayed artist and his wife finally set adrift in a sea of war dead, the audience is enveloped in a dream objectified by the directness of Bergman's artistry. One recognizes the degree of control the filmmaker has exercised because his film is so concentrated, so perfectly removed from the real world where we don't hear sounds or see objects in such isolated patterns. But one also sees that the film is open to anyone's experience: levels of meaning are built by the filmed events, not merely suggested by torturous internal symbolism.

The film knows what to make of itself: Its last scrap of dialogue describes a napalmed rose bush burning-a vision too beautiful to be saddening and a devastating slap at an audience new exhilarated by Bergman's art. Bergman wanted to go still further and remove the audience from its passive acceptance of screen images. In last spring's The Passion of Anna, the audience is forced to appreciate and analyze the elements of dramatic characterization: each of the participating actors freely explains his own conceptions of his work at breaks in the narrative. The story itself is constructed in time so that one immediately recognizes that Bergman's argument develops out of whole lives. Most heartening of all is the film's positive philosophic viewpoint: through the new relationships Bergman built with his actors, he was able to urge in their drama that men should not take the seeming incomprehensibility of social events as an excuse for inaction and that the innate loneliness of each individual should not prevent or poison love.

BERGMAN'S remarkable conversion has been one of many. In the same four-year period, artists responding similarly to an overheated social atmosphere have tried to develop a new clarity of expression, so that they could be totally conscious of their work's effect, and the screen could be "demystified." These who could not afford Bergman's moral imperatives moved to a political analysis of film's purpose as a commodity. The combination of ideological certainty with artistic virtuosity that Godard has inspired in many filmmakers, has produced considerable tension: young Bernardo Bertolucci, director of The Conformist , underwent psychiatric treatment because of his split with his mentor: his new film deals entirely with the bourgeoisie, and on their own terms.

The level of film discussion could not help but be elevated by these new developments-even on the end page of the CRIMSON. Film critics now are not only obligated to judge the quality of execution (something very few could do anyway), but the righteousness of conception. If filmmakers do not have the divine ideal of the Chartres craftsmen, or even the security of a standard-setting Hollywood and socialized public, they are not possessed of the philosophic rationale developed by film critics.

At times, the new film criticism seems to wallow in groundless theorizing. One succinct and complete definition of a Godardian-Marxist viewpoint was voiced by Jim Crawford '71 in his review of Sontag's Duet for Cannibals:

"THE REVOLUTION isn't coming soon," says Dr. Arthur Bauer, Marxist-intellectual-in-exile of Susan Sontag's Duet for Cannibals . If this is so, the role of the alienated cultural vanguard-both necessary and sufficient-must lie in assaulting the ruling culture, in destroying the primacy of bourgeois humanism. Godard has undertaken this task politically by creating dialectical confrontations with the mystified, "larger than life" Hollywood image. He launches a direct, ideological attack, using the cinema as a two-dimensional "blackboard" to counter the "in-depth," "universal" presentation of classless "Man" in bourgeois films. The technological advent of sophisticated, depth-of-focus lenses in the '40's made possible a new reactionary genre that dominates Hollywood today (or vice versa, as Godard would note: "the invention of photography: for whom? against whom?"-an advance determined by class relations, a perfection of bourgeois cultural oppression, as he explains in Wind From the East ) based on a more "convincing" and "realistic" image with spatial and dramatic ambiguity. Orson Welles first developed the new realism in Citizen Kane -its elements of symbolism, multi-level causality, mystery, and ambiguity (tragedy, too)-and Andre Bazin glorified it in criticism, developing a metaphysical formalism that invests the most innocent pan or track with human Significance. Autenrist critics go even further in this direction in order to justify selected Hollywood directors with extrapolated. Meaning and with metaphysical implications of "unique, personal style. " Godard seeks to strip the cinema of all these vague dimensions that obscure the realities of a class society, and to discover a linear, political dimension for the dialectical discussion of material conditions. His rejection of depth-of-focus is a political rejection of the pretensions to "universality" and "realism" in bourgeois art.

How this can be applied is shown by Mike Prokosch '70 in his review of a recent film which particularly begs for the treatment because it is "revolutionary" in its pretensions. The review was called," Another Counter Revolutionary Film Bites the Dust."

LEE LOCKWOOD, the photojournalist who did interview books with Fidel Castro and Eldridge Cleaver, will run a benefit show at the Harvard Square Theatre this Sunday at 12:30 p.m. Proceeds go to a worthy cause, the Cuban Study Center, which will help support such beloved leftist writers as Lockwood, Jason Epstein, Sal Landau, and Jose Yglesias. The film is Tomas G. Alea's Memories of Under development. the first post Revolutionary Cuban dramatic feature to be shown in this country.

For those who want to see Cuba today, Memories does contain pictures and sounds recorded in 1966-67. If you have need for crude "documentary" evidence, I can assure you that you will see and hear Cuban faces and voices. But if you want some kind of understanding -of Cuba, of post-revolutionary societies, of women and men within them, or even of capitalism and yourself-this film won't help you at all.

It's very surprising, not to say disheartening, to see an imitation New Wave film coming out of the state film institute of a Communist country. True, it's evidence that Cuba's cultural and ideological policies aren't Stalinist- Memories, far from being Marxist, is a movie made about a bourgeois consciousness by bourgeois consciousness for bourgeois consciousness. So one could try to explain it as an attempt to help the bourgeoisie understand socialist Cuba, or vice versa. But there it certainly fails.

We could start anywhere; let's start concretely.The hero is a landlord still living off rents; he does not work. He keeps a huge modern apartment full of luxury items which obsess him more than they divert him. He is imprisoned by conspicuously useless memory-laden objects-his wife's dresses, his own collection of sculpture and painting, the very size of his rooms. These keep him from understanding his life; they keep him thinking about surplus value subjectively and purely in itself, as Scott Fitzgerald might have said in a drunken Marxist moment.

This explanation of the hero's inability to understand and change himself is purely idealistic. It assumes that the causes of people's ideas about the world are other ideas; that myths and obsessions regenerate themselves endlessly. It doesn't tell the other half of the story-the objective half which complements this detailing of the hero's subjective state.

Memories takes the hero's consciousness and treats it as something inescapable. It is made from inside the hero's consciousness, or from inside a consciousness so like his as to be virtually indistinguishable. No revolutionary values or Marxist ideas are advanced anywhere in the film. Nothing is opposed objectively to the hero's point of view.

The hero's feelings mediate all relationships between him and the world. Cuba's historical development is treated as a succession of momentary impressions and memories; society is something that gives an individual consciousness "a sense of his situation" and nothing more. When the hero goes for a walk, the film hits you with a feeling of life and action, of the vitality of all the people on the street, quite at odds with the deadness of his apartment and Hemingway's villa, both of which are choked by memories and functionless objects. And that's as far as the film goes. It fails to think beyond its evocation of a middle-class man's moods.

The film does not try to develop ideas about its subject. It lacks any stylistic will to lay things open, to cut apart fictional characters or real societies so we can see better what they are made of. The Cuban Revolution, for example, is presented as the hero's "revenge on the stupid Cuban bourgeoisie-everything I don't want to be." It has no direct presence in his life; he is always buffered from it by this sense or that feeling. Even when the Cuban legal system intervenes in his life, and puts him on trial for rape, Alea presents the whole situation through his eyes-along with his voice-over judgments of the poor people accusing him, judgments from a highly bigoted upper-class perspective. The hero's generalizations about national character, his sense of the country, the Cuban soul, his generally useless impressions of social events, all run through the film and stand as a description of Cuba which the film nowhere objectively opposes. His oppressive sense of the alien city with its crowds, characteristic of the most hackneyed modern Western fiction, stands unchallenged as a description of Havana under socialism.

I know the film's admirers will attack this description on the grounds that Memories gives an accurate picture of bourgeois consciousness. Accrete, yes, but incomplete. And the ways in which it is incomplete are the ways that would most help us to understand the causes of that consciousness and the way to change it. For example Elena, a one-dimensional woman the hero picks up one day, keeps being described as "underdeveloped," unable to sustain an idea or feeling, erratic, skittish-chauvinist cliches which the film gravely takes for a personality condition that fell from the sky. That's the way she acts, period; that's her given personality, not a product of the specific material conditions and social developments which she's experienced all her life. Like the hero's, Elena's consciousness is beyond analysis.

MEMORIES of Underdevelopment does lip service to progressive filmmaking; and there too it cops out. It includes phony pieces of self-criticism; a pseudo-reflexive section wherein Elena, wanting to become an actress, has the hero take her to ICAIC, the Cuban film institute, where he just happens to know a director who has found some pieces of old Hollywood films cut out by Battista's censors, and who wants to incorporate them into a new film he's making-he doesn't know quite how, his film will be a "collage" of social bits and pieces; and thus Alea manages to slip in a description of his own film. This is scarcely cinema criticizing its own ideas. It is rather a shoddy narrative device for making self-conscious remarks. Elsewhere, too, Elea shows himself unprepared to address his audience directly: a revolutionary speech has to be established as coming from a radio in a room. Alea isn't willing to break the narrative line, the fictional continuity, of his film so as to communicate an idea directly. Ideas have to take a back seat to fictional characters and narrative conventions in Memories of Underdevelopment.

One of the film's most interesting undeveloped ideas is its description of underdevelopment as a condition which makes people unable to relate things, to sustain ideas and feelings. But that's the condition and the effect more of bourgeois culture than of underdevelopment, and that's the condition of Memories . And that's why it's reactionary: it doesn't take an approach that would help its designers or its audience understand its subject and change it; it makes personal and social conditions instead of laying them open. It is, in fact, another Hollywood film.

The greatest challenge, however, remains the analysis of a film which emerges from factual experience and, in the way it is molded, reveals important social and aesthetic prejudices of which the filmmakers themselves may not have been aware. Joel Haycock '71, while reviewing Gimme Shelter, speaks not only of a film but of the culture it is drawn from and the systems which support it.

THE SHORT history of rock and roll festivals is circumscribed by three singular events: the Monterey Festival, the Lake Bethel Festival, and a day-long concert at the Altamont Speedway. Each event's claim to singularity is by this time a matter of commonly received opinion: as our commentators have it. Monterey marked the apotheosis of the San Francisco-based flower culture, the Bethel concert (Woodstock) was the great coming together for, in its advertisement's words, three days of Love, Peace and Music, and Altamont the death of flower-power, the death of Love, the death of Rock, depending on whom you read. How each of these affairs became elevated to the status of a major event, dwarfing even Newport in its heyday, is a question of some interest, especially since both the monied press and the so-called underground press (that press, you will remember, which grew up in opposition to the established press) subscribe to and share an interest in essentially the same apprehension of all three experiences. The difference between the Life Magazine extra on Woodstock and Rolling Stone's Woodstock issue confines itself to details of taste and description; the broad interpretative outlines are the same, though Rolling Stone's hosannas are perhaps a bit more shrill and explicitly self-promoting. This confluence of such ostensibly antagonistic perspectives extends to the Altamont concert; from Newsweek to the Berkeley Tribe , Altamont, in the Tribe's words, "... like the massacre at Song My, exploded the myth of innocence."

Both the festival at Altamont and the one at Bethel are events identified as places, or, as those not yet embarrassed about the whole charade will tell you, states of mind. The interrelationship between the two events is so directly drawn by so many people that one can't help but nurture some suspicions. The formal integrity seems extravagant-Woodstock's tacky dreams shimmer a little too loudly, while Altamont's function as some sociological reality principle is dramatically too neat. It seems like we've been treated to some show in which one character has been introduced only to be demolished by another's appearance, both acts completed to concerted applause.

After all, what distance could possibly separate two occasions whose circumstances are so similar. In each, hip producers intent on fantastic publicity hurriedly choose an inadequate location, throw up a scaffold, and invite hundreds of thousands of white middle-class kids to enjoy themselves. Michael Lang was instrumental in arranging both events, and in neither case did he worry himself with considerations such as food, water, shelter, transportation, safety, sanitary facilities, etc. Comparing the footage of Altamont in Gimme Shelter with that of Bethel in Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock , it's hard to see any difference in the crowds' composition or their activities; the former looks like any other mass concert to me, and it's photographed like Woodstock or Monterey for that matter: idyllic scenes with babies or dogs, shots of breasty women, exotic clothing, close-ups of people getting high, a freak-out, a few nude scenes, some unashamed embraces, more drugs, more exotic clothing, another breast, etc. But then there's the Angels, some clubbings, and the death of Meredith Hunter. . . .

Woodstock would hardly seem to deserve its luminous aura. There were beatings; hundreds took poison acid; at one point at least 75,000 people screamed "Jump" to some kid on top of a three hundred foot scaffolding; all "natural for a city of 400,000," said the papers. There were deaths at Woodstock also, three of them, but along with two births they were attributed to the "life cycle." A boy without a place to sleep lay down in unknown field and was run over the next morning by a tractor. Now no camera crew was present then, or when a girl died of a burst appendix before receiving medical attention, just as no photographer recorded the deaths of Mark Feiger and Richard Savlov, two kids killed at Altamont when a driver trying to find the freeway slammed his car into their campsite. No one saw some guy fall into an unlit, unfenced irrigation ditch near the Speed way either; he drowned. And of course for none of these fatalities was there upbeat musical accompaniment, nor were they the subject of Mick Jagger's attentions.

I hope all of this isn't mawkish, but the point is simply that institutional negligence (under which I would classify the callous transgressions of promoters like Lang or Melvin Belli) does not make good copy or flashy movies. When thirty-eight miners suffocate in a mineshaft which doesn't even meet the government's lax specifications, that "tragedy" is accorded the treatment the press gives to earthquakes and other natural disasters, but New York filmmakers aren't about to fly down to Kentucky or wherever and compose a film around it. Instead it's the front page one day, then the last bodies are dug up the next day on page seven, and two days later finds a press release on the official enquiry at the bottom of forty-two. Meanwhile, "the trial of Charles Manson entered its fifth month today, and our reporter is at the courthouse with the story. Bill?" "Thank you, Ted. The trial of Charles Manson entered . . ."

No, when the world goes wrong and we demand that someone pay for it, when Life Magazine needs a demon for our collective exorcism, we and Life look to the powerless (or occasionally to those that have fallen from power, reading that economic demise as testament to some moral failing). Denying one of the central facts of our social life, namely that the most chilling barbarities are fomented in committee, we isolate villains who cooperatively identify themselves by being members of the economic periphery in the first place (non-whites, "criminals," "drug addicts," the "insane," etc.). By assigning responsibility for our own uneasiness to individuals rather than to structures we reassure ourselves that the world has a human face, that if we only could root out the bad guys, vote in our own people (elect a new President), the harmony of our situation could be restored, life would attain once against its manageable shape.

Hence everybody loves murders; they have real human villains, and the good ones have "helpless" victims (women, children, old people), or at least valorous ones (police, prisoners of war). Unsafe assembly lines, malconstructed bleachers, badly-made cars can claim lives every day, though we'll hear little about it; but let some psychopath carve up a few nurses, or someone shoot a cop over in Brighton and we'll never hear the end of it. Journalism consists of the substitution of an event's dramatic elements for the event itself; newspapers and magazines are drama by other means. Let me entertain you.

GIMME SHELTER was directed by Charlotte Zwerin and the Mayles brothers, Albert and David; these last have been two of the most important film makers to come out of the direct cinema movement. The direct cinematographer is a special kind of film journalist who, rather than creating (or reconstructing) events, attempts to situate himself in the midst of them. Though he cannot transcend his subjective viewpoint, his object is ostensibly an objet trove, a "real life drama," and the structure of his film is to be determined by the nature of that object in action. Thus Albert says of Gimme Shelter that "we structure around what actually turned out to happen"; "what comes out of it is a surprise to us as well."

Given their direct cinema background the Maysles were undoubtedly uncomfortable with such disjunct segments; there they were with gobs of stage performance footage, an exclusive on Meredith Hunter's murder, and no way to integrate the two. Then someone hit on the bright idea of showing the footage to the Stones, of filming their responses to themselves, to Tina Turner, to the Altamont arrangements, and of course to the stabbing itself. Throughout Gimme Shelter the Maysles cut from a filmed event to a shot of that same film running through a viewer, and then cut to one of the Stones' vacant faces, a vacancy, you understand, which is supposed to read as shock, or grief, or incomprehension. When Jagger finally sees the murder footage, the big moment has all the spontaneity and excitement of that astronaut's first words from the moon: stagily concerned, Jagger mumbles, "Can you roll back on that, David."

The device serves two functions. First, it gives Shelter an intellectual gloss: Mick or Keith's contemplation suggests the burden of self-consciousness, a filmed discourse on the relation of self to representation, etc., etc. Naturally this is all glitter; what such a schema really does here is allow the filmmakers to cut another slam-bang rock 'n' roll number in every four or five minutes without risking a stylistic break. That way the sequences of Melvin Belli negotiating for the Stones, virtually the only explanation tendered in the entire film concerning who is responsible for what, are not permitted to drag on at "unnecessary" length, a few shots of Belli in his preposterous office deemed sufficient to reveal all, and then again, it's the Angels who are the pigs, right? But most importantly, the device is real Teen Scene stuff: given the Indochinese War, racism, a murder, or some other tragedy, the big question in all the fans' minds becomes, How do the Stones react to all this?

WELL, not very interestingly, but then what's interesting about the footage in the first place? You learn that Richard identifies with Jagger, that both of them have seen the Beatles' movies and aspire to their brand of self-conscious humor. You see the Stones at Work and at Play, On Stage and Off, but the latter sequences are brief, unrevealing, and have sound-overs to help them go down easier. You get two new Stones' songs, one called "Wild Horses," with lines like "Wild horses couldn't drag me away/ Wild horses, we'll ride them someday," and the other a derivative "Brown Sugar." And you get lots of live performances, but frankly the cloying, infatuated photography renders even these tedious after three or four songs; the Maysles seemed to have realized this, and Shelter's nadir comes when they try to jazz up their presentation of "Love in Vain" with rapturous slow-motion andYard,' with its hallowed dormitories that once housed some of our nation's great literary, philosophic and scientific minds." I found the use of the past tense particularly interesting.

The sightseers also got a firsthand look at another part of hallowed Harvard-the traffic in the Square. The ever-informative Phil launched into a lengthy oration about the jam we got tied up in. "Now this traffic is unusually heavy," he began. "It has been heavy from time to time, but more so today than usual. You'll find that this is a bad time to go through Harvard Square. . . ." But we finally got going again, and Phil directed our attention to "Holyoke Student Center." We learned about Harvard Square, particularly its various shops, and then, since it needed to be said as we all observed, Phil concluded, "The only thing that's changed has been the people."

And one thing that strikes you about the people around the Square,

Soon we were on our way again, and Phil had to struggle a bit to get through the parking lot because of a car which was poorly parked, making about a 45-degree angle with the white parking lines. A girl was getting out of the door. Phil pointed her out and derided her parking, then added, "She's probably some student taking some highly intellectual course?"

We ringed the Common and headed up Garden Street past the grave-yard and the Ed School, and Phil directed our attention to the Radcliffe Yard. "Behind that wall on the left is an institution whose students graduate with as high an honor as any man from Harvard. It's called Radcliffe School for Girls."

But Phil's big joke of the day was yet to come. Mt. Auburn Cemetery is on our tour, and Phil told us that 175 acres were used up and that five remained. "But there's one stipulation on the last five acres," Phil said. "No