The Moviegoer The Damned at the Cheri Theater

I CAN'T get over the emptiness of Hollywood's recent productions. Their scripts shun new insights into human behavior. They lack even the requisite for plain entertainment-richness of detail. The incidents that occasionally occur in these films are threadbare. Save that gag. Sam-you'll need it for those ten TV shows you're doing after this script.

Audiences are cating up M. A. S. H. only because it puts a little complexity into character and plot development. The film is neither relevant nor savage-nor particularly anti-war: it's just so last you don't notice its superficiality till you leave the theater. While a grisly joke is being played on Elliot Gould, Sutherland is over there asserting his salty personality, and when that begins to pall your attention is diverted by a new twist on that old running gag in the background. M. A. S. H. simply gives its audience more than one thing to watch at a time. It therefore becomes the only recent American commercial feature to stay more interesting than watching people on the sidewalk would have been.

Scriptwriters aren't the only guilty parties; visual and dramatic direction usually is worse. There's this aesthetic, if you want to dignify it with that name, going around, American audiences accept it because it has a vague respectability-by-association with Neo-Realist methods. This "aesthetic" says that instead of enlivening a slow script with some action and character development, the director should exploit its opportunities for pointless camera essays. Bullitt is an apt example. All scenes last unbearably long because Peter Yates, its "director," didn't know what to do with a slick script except stretch its banality a little further. You a paying audience, are offered fat sequences of self-conscious camerawork, which having nothing better to do than look at the dimly attractive props of Hollywood Purgatory-the pretty starlet, the lush plastic colors, and that good-looking Steve McQueen.

Every technique that falls into the hands of these bankrupt meatheads is overused and thereby cheapened. They haven't the taste to restrict their expressive means to their slight ends, which would give us at least well-crafted films. By lending directors the license of artists the current "aesthetic" prevents them from even learning their craft competently. Francis Ford Coppola is praised for sloppy work while Vincent Canby makes snide cracks about an artist like Douglas Sirk.

Hollywood's new wonder boys have no guts either. Far from being seriously involved in the material they shoot, they don't even take the trouble to punch a little action and detail into it. In visual direction this means the old Neo-Realist aesthetic, that looking at events in the exterior world has a certain necessary validity, is misapplied in a fiction-film context-so that it becomes sufficient to let the camera run in the barren studio set. This discourages work on the images themselves. The structure of a frame composition used to have some meaning in Hollywood. Nowadays shots refer to objects and people without conferring order on their spatial relations. That's unacceptable even to good documentarists. In the words of one of the best, Joris Ivens: "The theatre screen is not a window through which you look at the world, it is a world in itself."

THE VIRTUE of The Damned is that it accepts the devices which make current film-making flabby: the zoom and the telephoto lens, artificially colored lighting, freely structured compositions, and long takes. Then it shows what a man with guts, who teants to make this picture, can do with these techniques.

Visconti's style is extravagant and non-realistic, as you see when green begins to tinge the edges of characters' faces and collect in pools on the Essenbeck mansion's parquet floor. God knows the bedroom scene between power-crazed Ingrid Thulin and her contrite Bogarde employs dialogue no real person ever uttered. Visconti offers us human passions and errors on a grander scale than the realistic. Thus his blocking of scenes, which is heavy and slow, focuses dramatic energy inward onto the relationships of the Essenbeck family. Visconti's mise-en-scene is equally grandiose, incorporating massive interiors and immense spaces. It helps integrate the characters into one pattern of contrary emotional drives. The film's confinement within one mansion becomes the best way to maintain intense and unified oppositions of personal lust.

The Damned has so much style. That's what makes it strong, Visconti's not afraid to use new techniques, about which he knows more than a thousand Peter Yateses, in a way that gives them some meaning. He builds a strong narrative with character development-ponderous and inevitable, but development all the same. His zooms are extra-ordinarily solid in framing and speed. His telephoto panning shots, for example in the birthday-party sequence, have the selective impact of cuts from person to person.

Visconti puts devices to work instead of displaying them on the surface. Yates and such assume that the simple presence of pretty colors and zooms is the end, not the means, of their work, thereby showing themselves to be the slaves, not the masters, of their craft. Damned stupid slaves, too.

IT'S theoretically insufficient, though, to argue that Visconti's extravagance is justified by its strong and constant significance. That argument would end by calling for greater economy of means than Visconti used. As a means to intended significances, Visconti's pacing and visual style are slow and luxurious, his dialogue and acting excessively explicit. Fortunately, cost-benefit analyses do not apply to works of art, which justify their means by appealing to our sense of internal order and formal beauty.

Whether The Damned is a work of art can only be judged on these grounds: whether it creates a world that coheres through its own formal order. As it happens, that is the film's strength. It's a mistake to say that it should have been faster-paced, tighter, subtler, or more inventive. Its weight and scale are such that tampering with its speed, or adding inessential background incidents for relief, would add nothing to the essential structure and beauty of the film.

Every one of The Damned's details and artistic decisions clearly indicates the intentions of a strong-willed artist. The very presentation of the film's material shouts out Visconti's moral and political position on Nazi Germany. If the Damned have ever existed, they were the industrial aristocrats who brought Hitler to power. Visconti's weighty melodrama of almost impersonal passion was the only just way to describe their self-destruction.