New York Film Festival: Hits and Misses

The third annual New York Film Festival held at Lincoln Center two years ago, came close to becoming important event in the international film world. Like the festivals at Cannes or Venice, it provided a survey of the most recent masterpieces established directors, such as Godard, Kurosawa, Visconti, Ray, and Dreyer. In addition, the New York showing introduced much fresh talent. Three brilliant Eastern European directors, Jan Kadar and Milos Forman from Czechoslovakia and Jerzy Skolimowski from Poland, had their American debut at the Festival.

Still Richard Roud, the program director, was hard put to fill his two-week schedule. To solve his problem Roud admitted vintage flics that should certainly have been left under dust, such as Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March (1927)

John Cromwell's Of Human Boudage (1934), and contemporary films of a quality not commensurate with either the trappings of Philharmonic Hall or the steep admission price.

Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt), presently riding the crest of the New Wave, began the festival with his most recent film, Alphaville. His hero, Lemmy Caution, is a cross between Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, spiced with a touch of Humphrey Bogart. (At one point we catch Caution reading The Big Sleep.) Godard lets his imagination run wild as his comic-strip hero battles the computer-king of a super-mechanized science fiction city. Neon signs flash mathematical formulas across the screen, and the computer growls instructions from what looks like a CBS recording studio.

But Godard's point will probably escape his American audience. For the city of Alphaville is not just any city of the future; it is Paris, perverted by Americanization, the city of light turned fluorescent. A mad scientist from New York, Dr. Von Braun, has imposed the computer on the helpless Alphavillians. Only another New Yorker, like Caution, can cope with such an environment.

The Festival also recieved Godard's Le Petit Soldat, made in 1960 but never before shown in this country. The film, banned in France, concerns the activities of a group of Rightist terrorists who bomb noted French liberals in placid Geneva. To introduce the actress Anna. Karina, his latest find, Godard has a fictional magazine photographer shoot pictures of her singing, pouting, and dancing for five full minutes.

Fact Is Fiction

He uses the scene to illustrate his belief that there is no division between fiction and reality. Both the fictional photographer in the film and the actual movie camera are taking pictures of Anna Karina. Similarly in another scene, gangsters, slick and cool as in a detective story, appear very real when they trip over their own feet.

The most eagerly awaited film, Luchine Visconti's Sandra, arrived fresh from a victory at Venice. The audience's hopes were raised even higher during the beautiful opening sequence, where Visconti mounts his camera on the back of a speeding Ferrari and then zooms the lens into a nearby glade to capture a flock of wheeling birds.

But such overpowering imagination does not continue throughout the film. A modern adaptation of Electra, Sandra concerns the Italian wife of an American diplomat, who has committed incest with her brother. Visconti has strangely tacked a happy ending onto the tragedy, as Sandra overcomes her illicit feelings and returns to her husband. After the long emotional buildup, one feels robbed of the catharsis. Perhaps Visconti was attempting to pour new life into an old form by providing a different kind of shock at the resolution.

Claudia Cardinale as Sandra performs an exquisite tragic role until she turns from self-destruction to reform. Visconti then takes her off-camera quickly, and she reappears only briefly at the end of the film. The film has jumped its tracks and no actress would have been capable of staying aboard.

Satyajit Ray, the Indian director who made the Apu trilogy about a poor village youth who migrates to a city, has shifted in Charulata to a study of the upper classes. Ray's camera roams with almost tactile pleasure over the sets of delicately embroidered furniture, wide leafy gardens, and other richly-patterned items of the Indian aristocracy.

Barren Twosome

Charulata and Bhupati are a childless couple, entering their thirties in Calcutta of the 1880's. Offspring carry special importance in the Indian tradition, and Bhupati attempts to drown his frustration in overdevotion to a liberal newspaper he has founded. Charulata would like to write poetry, but is prevented by the constrictions placed on women in Indian society.

Their marriage trembles when Charulata falls in love with Bhupati's poet brother, as a refuge from her barrenness. At the end, however, the husband and wife manage to find love within the conventions of marriage, by accepting not their fate but each other. In Charulata Ray is reiterating a long-standing theme--that no circumstances are too dire to preclude happiness. The director's constant optimism becomes especially impressive in the context of modern India.

Half of the audience in Philharmonic Hall gave The Shop on High Street a deserved five-minute standing ovation; the other half remained seated, paralyzed by the film's impact. Director Jan Kadar uses his camera as the eyes of Tono Britko to place the viewer inside the mind of the simple farmer who the Nazis make the "Aryan Manager" of a Jewish button shop in Czechoslovakia.

When Britko drinks, Kadar places a rum glass before the lens; when Britko wakes up, the camera moves slowly along the ceiling and wall and finally up his legs, coming into focus with exquisite timing. Soon the audience becomes vicarious inhabitants of Britko's village. We walk down the main street behind Briko as he tips his hat to friends; we stop to hear an old fiddler play a bitter-sweet tune; we cringe when a Nazi dragoon marches by.

The plot concerns Britko's response when the old Jewish lady who owns the shop must be hidden to avoid deportation. Before the troops and trucks arrive, the film trips along as a charming piece of village comedy in which the audience easily becomes involved. When Kadar shifts unexpectedly to tragedy, the audience gets swept helplessly along.

We enter Britko's fantasies as he pictures a dream world of dazzling sunshine (shot by superimposing the characters on an overexposed setting) where he and old Mrs. Lautmann can stroll elegantly along the shadows and sunrays, listening to the town band. But the blare of the Nazi band returns him to reality. The audience undergoes a similar fantasy sequence at the end of the film, which is broken finally by the lights of the movie theater as the film ends.

This kind of subtle rhythm binds together the entire film. Unquestionably a masterpiece of all time, The Shop on High Street in itself justifies this year's festival. One only hopes that future New York Festivals will discover works of comparable quality