Shirley Hamburg

The chief spokesman for the “independent or underground film-makers” in this country is Jonas Mekas.

He resides in New York where he edits an anti-intellectual (anti-art?) rather ethereal, often pretentious magazine, FILM CULTURE.

“As long as the ‘lucidly minded’ critics will stay out with their ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘art,’ ‘structure, ‘ ‘clarity,’ ‘importance,’—everything will be all right, just keep them out.

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James Dickey, in his delightful book of essays The Suspect in Poetry, distinguishes four main ways of reacting to poems which are worth repeating as they may be applicable to film.

In ascending order of importance they are 1) “This probably isn’t so, and even if it were I could-not care less,” 2) “This may be true enough as far as it goes, but well ... so what? 3) “This is true or at least convincing, and therefore I respond to it differently than I do to poems in the first two categories, and 4) “This is true with a kind of truth at which I could never have arrived by myself, but its truth is better than the one I had believed.”

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On opening night of the Fourth Annual New York Film Festival, back in September, there appeared a ‘band of outsiders’ picketing the fountain on the plaza of Lincoln Center. There were maybe four or five men, dressed in black, wearing gas masks, carrying coffins on their shoulders.

A few days later, people attending the Special Events program on the Independent Cinema at the fest were handed flyers printed on pop-art orange paper entitled Engaged Cinema in the United States. When I read this statement of purpose, I found it to be one of the most compelling and sobering calls to arms to emerge in this country in the area of film. I later discovered that the opening night pickets were affiliated with Cinema Engagé, as they are called.

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“We’ll save it in the editing.”

Though true of James Cruze, Griffith, Stroheim, this maxim was hardly any longer true of Murnau, Chaplin, and becomes irretrievable untrue with sound film. Why? Because in a film such as Eisenstein’s “October” (and still more so with “Que Viva Mexico”) editing is above all the supreme touch of direction. Elena, just as Mr. Arkadin, is a model of editing because each in its class is a model of directing.

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In adapting a bulky, densely detailed novel of seven volumes, Mai Zetterling has extricated the following schema in her movie, “Loving Couples:” her three women have in common a place and a time of arrival, the hospital, set immediately at the beginning of the film; a starting time, childhood; a central time and place, the chateau and the longest night, Midsummer. This schema orders and disorders brilliantly the destiny of the three lives in which childhoods, love affairs, childbearings correspond to one another.

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