European Film Maker Criticizes U.S. Movies, Harvard Audience

A noted French cinematologist has loosed a blast at Boston and Cambridge movie theatres and has also indicted a Harvard audience.

Louis Marcorelles, who made a three-month tour of the U.S. to study its movies, reported his observations in the latest issue of the British film quarterly Sight and Sound.

"The cinemas of Boston and its sister city, Cambridge, surprise me by the indifferent quality of their projection," Marcorelles says. "The sound is often indistinct, the focusing poor."

"And these are first-run cinemas," Marcorelles adds, "the admission price ranging from $1.65 to $2.00; with one or two exceptions, the auditoriums are as decrepit and unappetizing as they could possibly be.

At Harvard's International Forum he created "a minor scandal" when he illustrated a lecture on the "New Wave" by showing Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, the movie about Nazi concentration camps that Ivy Films also presented to the public a few weeks ago.

He tried, he says, "to explain how the film relates to the body of Resnais' work, and that Resnais himself prefers it to his features. Part of the audience was overwhelmed, the rest outraged: how dare one show such a film 17 years after the end of the war? Isn't it time everything was forgotten? Suddenly, in retrospect, Resnais' work takes on its full meaning."