The New York Film Festival Twelve Nights in a Dark Room: You Can't Always Get What You Want

THE difference between a saint and an artist, they say, is that an artist knows he's a liar. Making sense out of existence is a dangerous game: the temptations of Conviction, on the one hand, and utter, shapeless Alienation, on the other, are usually seductive enough to deprive piety of content and realism of form. "Spit in a whore's face and she'll tell you it's raining," goes an old Yiddish proverb. What to do about reality seems to have become a problem of choice, and a film-maker who suspects that both documentary and story are lies isn't likely to respect the concept of entertainment, either. As a result, going to the movies has become a chiefly personal experience-we want to know which things Bunuel can still believe in, and which Godard cannot.

The Eighth New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center assembled twenty-eight new movies, three of them American. New York, God knows, breeds a certain kind of self-conscious hip, and New York film-makers specialize in almost preternatural disaffection. The film critics in that town, who often address their reviews to moot points raised by colleagues, frequently succumb to sinful postures, not the worst of which is seeing one-self as cosmic arbiter of good taste. If the audiences which attended the critics' showings are any index of the stance which such enlightened viewers take towards movies, then most modern films are being scrutinized through rose-tinted glasses, darkly. In any event, some of the films are especially good, some are especially interesting, and most will be trucking on up to Boston this fall and winter.

The Festival opened with Francois Truffaut's newest film, L'Enfant Sauvage. Its story is simple and factually accurate, based on the journal of Jean Itard, a Parisian doctor who tries to turn a wild child found in the woods into a human being. Although the boy was thought to be deaf, dumb, and retarded by his discoverers, Itard manages to teach him to speak and understand language, to read, and ultimately, to love. L'Enfant Sauvage is a lot less violent than The Miracle Worker, a film which Truffaut admires, but the essential themes are similar: the birth of a person, the politics of trust, the erotics of subtle change.

L'Enfant Sauvage is shot in black and white, and Truffaut frequently uses an iris diaphragm rather than a dissolve to end a scene. There are few close-ups in the film; most of the shots, in fact, are full-length portraits: Itard standing in his frock coat at his writing desk, his housekeeper pouring milk into a white china bowl, the boy drinking water at a window. The visual effect is to capture the period charm of engravings. By discovering conventions and exploiting them, Truffaut is inviting us to share in an artistic is trust with him. That he succeeds with an audience which usually prefers confession to narration is a measure of his talent.

Truffaut himself plays the part of Itard. He explained after the screening, "I think the role of the film director is like Itard's. Both are trying to create form, to give shape and personality where none existed before, I wanted to be the director in front of the lens instead of behind it; I didn't want to work through an intermediary."

What makes L'Enfant Sauvage so interesting is that the child is not being civilized and humanized in an abstract or theoretical sense. The civilization toward which he is being inched possesses a very special race, moment, and milieu. He is being crafted into the late eighteenth-century conception of human beings. The boy is not exactly a Noble Savage, but it is impossible for Itard not to have had Rousseau in mind; the doctor many not be a poet, but he is inexorably caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the birth of Romanticism. The film (like Pygmalion, or Frankenstein ) is deeply moving: in its story, one man turns an idea about humanity into flesh. And if the jump from idea to flesh, from symbol to image, constitutes the process of education, it also constitutes the process of cinema.

ANDREW SARRIS, who should know, calls Godard "the most self-conscious film-maker in the world." In Vent de L'est, a 1969 film which opened at the Festival, Godard passes from self-consciousness to militant solipsism. The movie is, first, about capitalism, colonialism, and exploitation. It is a Western, set at the Alcoa plant just outside of Dodge City. Almost numbingly didactic, the film catalogues the niceties of repression, as Godard's troupe performs a classic ballet; a strike occurs; a delegate to management is chosen; active minorities speak up; an assembly is followed by repression; an active strike marks the onset of a police state.

But Godard's choreography is concerned more with the dance than the dancers. The middle section of the movie is explicitly about film-his film, the nature of film, the death of film. Godard's cinema collective assembles on screen, and the members discuss what has already gone wrong with the film they are making. Significantly, their criticisms are ideological rather than aesthetic.

One scene in the Western section of the movie portrays in mime the confrontation of the union delegate with management. The voice of the narrator insists, "But even in the presentation of his demands, the union representative is betraying the workers." That notion is intellectually exciting: simply placing the question in the language and symbols of the ruling class has betrayed the will of the strikers.

In the auto-critique section of the movie, that concept is used like a dissecting needle to tease at our ideas about films and filmmakers. In such a schema the director is an oppressor, and actors are members of an oppressed class. An actor, especially a Hollywood actor, is a tool of his own exploitation because he willingly and professionally dons new selves dictated by the convictions (whims) of the director. It becomes impossible to make a movie about repression, for any movie is repression. The auto-critique, the attenuated scenes of actors applying make-up, the unmoving shots held for four minutes at a time, transform Vent de L'est from movie into "movie": it details Godard-once again-confronting his form, denouncing its inadequacies, and translating the whole process into story.

That story, though, is excruciatingly boring. Godard never said he was interested in entertaining; now, it appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally to be trusted no more than capitalists, mad dogs or artists.

BOB RAFELSON'S film, Five Easy Pieces, is already being touted as this year's Easy Rider, for whatever that's worth. The movie falls into two parts. In the first, an oil rigger played by Jack Nicholson lives the beer-drinking, bowling, broad-screwing life which most screenwriters and intellectuals imagine occurs in lower-middle working class settings. But we shortly discover that the boozer is also a piano player manque: he is a wandering, gifted member of an extraordinarily talented musical family. Nicholson is the prototype Alienated One, a sort of prodigal son with balls, and his journey up the West Coast toward Washington and his family is also a journey away from the constraints of identity.

There are brilliant moments in the film, moments in which Rafelson has crystallized what-it's-like-now and why-everything-is-so-depressing. Helena Kallianiotes as a dykey hitchhiker who is obsessed with ecology ("All this crap!") and mankind ("Man-man is such a shit! ") is a brilliant parody of an elusive type, the ardent but empty-headed advocate of well-intentioned but flaccid causes. (That she is portrayed as a Lesbian-in fact, that the more insipid characters of the film are women-betrays a nasty truth about the movie.) The bowling, beer, and sex scenes are authentic, the lampoon of a delightfully masturbatory intellectual cocktail party is great, and occasional small details (a baby crying in a diner, a formal meal set in a kitchen) are chillingly accurate.

But the movie fails in a most important way. Having set up the situation-having shown what the hell is wrong, having performed the mimetic function of art, having established a confidence which audiences grant only after strong reassurance-Rafelson blows it.

For example: A scene in a diner. Nicholson has had the classic crisis with the dumb waitress. She accepts no menu substitutions, cannot understand even his compromises. The moment arrives when our blood and Nicholson's are boiling with the same vengeful fury. Instead of responding to the situation (and response is what it's all about), Nicholson destroys it. Rather than commenting on the violent hate which such a situation calls up in us, rather than suggesting ways out these petty confrontations which add up to the trivial but crippling despairs of our existence, Five Easy Pieces plays a puerile round of wish-fulfillment. Nicholson sends the items on the table, amber water glasses, placements, and all, crashing toward the floor, there is a jump cut, and we're on the road again. It's a curious, but persistent form of emotional poverty, one which eats at the movie like acid on celluloid.

For another example: At the end of the film, Nicholson is again faced with a crisis: he is now alienated from both his bequeathed identity (gifted pianist) and his assumed one (oil rigger cum sumbitch). The moment is poignant enough, but the response of theprotagonist of Five Easy Pieces is only a depressingly immature reassertion of character consistency-he blows town. When what is desperately needed is a fresh way to look at something, we are given something to look at. Apocalyptic world-views are fashionable, and it's a respectable ambition to depict what it is that drives us to the brink. But artistry demands something more, a quality which separates images from visions. Five Easy Pieces is only a photograph of an attitude; its weakness is a reliance on a single, unhelpful, and finally depressing point of view.

PART OF THE brilliance of Le Boucher, Claude Chabrol's newest film, is the complexity which glides beneath the surface of a clean, moving, and beautifully liquid story. We know a man is guilty of murder, we know he loves a woman, and we know the woman loves him. Those discoveries are usually the fruit of stories, not their premises. But Chabrol uses evil, and love, and sexual repression as building blocks. He explores the concepts of emotional isolation and delayed gratification with a maturity rarely seen in conventional murder mysteries.

Because Le Boucher is primarily a narrative, because it moves from scene to scene discretely, with visible growths and amplifications, its realism conveys an almost anthropological charm. The story makes an explicit link between the drives and aspirations of the Cro-Magnon man and the diverted energies of us, his descendants. Sublimation, murder, and love are three traditionally heavy themes, and the fact that Chabrol sets them in a narrative (rather than historical, or surrealistic, or impressionistic) context allows them to assume the same weight that, say, Freudian psychopathology plays in Alice in Wonder-land

Le Boucher is also part documentary. The movie was shot in a French town near the site of the Lascaux caves, and many scenes include glimpses of locals whose faces are ingratiating. Kes, a British film directed by Ken Loach, is also part documentary, and the delicate way in which it mixes overt fiction with pure reportage is admirable. Kes is a kestrel hawk; the bird is caught and trained by a 15-year-old boy, and the movie is as much about freedom and repression than anything else. The boy is the no-good-nick of his class at school; the standard target of vicious schoolboy bullying, his mother and brother also treat him like a Yorkshire Dennis the Menace. The scenes at school-a football game, a career-placement interview, a dreary assembly-are astoundingly authentic, and the documentary aspect of the film makes it apparent that this landscape is the source material for If Kes is a bit cloying, but it's also very good.

DOCUMENTARIES can also be embarrassing, and Street Scenes 1970 was the stickiest red herring at the Festival. The film is a record of what occurred in New York after last May's strike (including some footage of the celebrated hard-hat incidents), and it also covers the march on Washington. That the photography and sound are of markedly poor quality, that the editing resorts to tricks (unspeakable in documentaries) like pixillation, and that the whole affair is packaged like a landmark of cinema verite, all pale before the movie's ugliest flaw: its politics are asinine. The interviewers are boorish, sexist, and reactionary, and the resulting sub-screen attitudes toward militancy, electoral politics, and violent revolution which emerge are at their very best a parody of post-teenybopper politics.

One particularly offensive scene occurs toward the close of the movie. The New York Cinetracts Collective (comprised mainly of a group from N. Y. U.) has completed the job of making the documentary, and it has assembled in a Washington, D. C. hotel room to discuss ( a la Godard and a la God knows who else) the ethics of having made a movie instead of responding to the crisis with political action. As they speak, and as the film's audience squirms in unbearable embarrassment, the moviemakers proceed to be mind-bogglingly male chauvinistic, grossly misguided about aesthetics, and ultimately personally ugly. Street Scenes 1970 was one of the most depressing items at the Festival, especially because it revealed a student consciousness passing as radical and progressive to be dishearteningly, pathetically corrupt.

In Hiroshima, Mon Amour and L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, Alain Resnais began his explorations of time and space dislocation. His newest film, Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, is precisely about that dislocation. A man enters a time-machine which looks like a high-school biology model of the human brain: scientists have told him that he will re-live exactly one minute of his life, at a point exactly a year ago. The machine goes berserk, and what follows is a visual montage of the man's past. Time barriers are simply not observed, and jumps from one sequence to the next follow a pattern which dimly emerges as the film proceeds.

It is a fascinating experiment in contemplation. We are privileged to observe pieces of a life, to examine what the concept of "significant experience" actually means. If the story isn't always fascinating, if Resnais' idea of a man's secret self is occasionally pedestrian, the film is still intriguing simply as a glimpse of the manner in which a director chooses to re-pattern the vicissitudes of human experience.

IL CONFORMISTA, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film, is a brilliant blending of psychological characterization and political action. The central character, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, was the victim of a homosexual assault in his youth. Having developed a consuming need for normalcy, he joins the Fascist party and works as a counter-espionage agent. The lushness, the depravity, and the insanity of pre-war Rome and Paris provide a stunning backdrop for the story ofTrintignant's political, moral, and sexual peregrinations.

Some scenes, like a blue-lit stroll down the Faubourg, like a dance-hall in which two silk-swathed women dance a drunken, passionate tango, like an amphitheatre-like hospital for the mentally ill where the whiteness of the walls is relieved only by the paleness of pallid flesh, are demonically spell-binding. In fact, the succession of images-a giant stone head of Mussolini dragged across a bridge by two motorcycles, the fire-lit nude body of a homosexual eating dead cats amid the ruins of the Forum, Trintignant's eyes-recalls Fellini Satyricon in their bizarre intensity. It's a perverse film, as perverse as Fascism, and that analogy is in many ways the point of the movie.

Bunuel's Tristana, which stars Catherine Dencuve, closed the Festival. The story is reminiscent of Viridinana: a beautiful young girl dressed in black enters the home of her guardian (Fernando Rey, who also played the uncle in Viridiana ); she becomes his mistress, then his wife; she destroys him. Loss of innocence is a favorite Bunuel theme, and Deneuve's progression from blond virgin to black widow is a passionate, nearly religious journey. What most marks the film is the blend of heresy and humanism for which Bunuel is distinguished.

The movie is nearly flawlessly executed, and its emphasis on story and detail makes it much more textured, far more moving, than a film like Five Easy Pieces. Perhaps a comparison of the two movies is unfair; Rafelson is just beginning his career, Bunuel is ending it with years of fully sustained excellence. But because both men are dealing, in the end, with the same kinds of problems-Is a person defined by himself or by his intimates? Is there such a thing as redemption through passion? Does geography have a personality-vindictive, liberating, or purely evil?-it seems appropriate to assess both films in the same context.

Bunuel is an artist, and he knows he's a sinner; Rafelson makes movies, and has a saint's deadly obsession with truth. "What you can, do," goes another Yiddish proverb; "what you have, hold; what you know, keep to yourself."