6 FEBRUARY 1971, Page 30

TONY PALMER

The universal praise accorded to Barbara Loden's film Wanda, now showing at the Academy Cinema in London, raises some curious questicins about the growth of the underground film. Wanda was in every sense a labour of love for Miss Loden; it cost very little and what it did was financed by her friends and professional associates. She wrote and directed it as well as playing the title role. It was shot in 16mm which was subsequently blown up to 35mm for cinema projection. The photographic quality is poor, the sound quality indifferent. The acting is often mediocre and self-conscious. And yet as a portrait of a dead-end divorcee shambling from one dead-beat situation to another, the film has a certain power, even charm.

That the film is being exhibited at all says a great deal for the continuing enterprise of the Academy Cinema management. Follow.. ing successful showings at the Venice and London film festivals, the inevitable end of

such a film would probably have been two or three screenings at the New Cinema Club or the 1cA and then oblivion. Such is the fate of most films not made directly or indirectly by the major companies. Of course, however well Wanda does at the Academy box-office, it will never get on to the larger British circuits, the iniquities of which are well known.

One particular story, probably less apocryphal than most, always seems to me to illustrate the attitude of the circuits to- wards the film makers. Tony Richardson's film The Charge of the Light Prigade con- tained one memorable sequence, that of the charge itself. It was cleverly edited so as to alternate between God's view, from which could be seen the toy soldier and farcical element of the operation, and enormous close-ups of horse-hooves, mangled bodies and grimy faces, from which could be seen the bloody reality of the situation. Richard- son had spent hours arranging the .sound track so that the contrasting views would be orchestrated aurally as well as visually.

Now, for every West End premiere, the cinema management will hold a rehearsal for the benefit of the projectionists who can thereby adjust their focus, sound levels and change-overs. At the rehearsal, Richardson noticed that there was something very strange about his carefully dubbed sound- track so he rushed up to the projection booth in the Odeon, Leicester Square (head- quarters of one of the two big circuits) to see what was wrong, Standing by the pro- jector he found a man with his hand resolutely on the volume control; every time the sound-track got loud, the man turned the volume down and every time the sound-track went quiet, he turned the, vol- ume up. When asked by an outraged Richardson why he was doing this, the projectionist replied that Mr Davis, the Managing Director of Rank, didn't like loud films.

It's little wonder that, with such an atti- tude, many film-makers prefer to work outside the established commercial frame- work. Were it not for the daunting fact that the cheapest film can still cost a lot of money and that such money in the present financial climate is hard to come by, prob- ably many more directors would opt out.

John Trevelyn once remarked jestingly that the reason he didn't like The Sound of Music was that for him it didn't have enough sex or violence. The ingredients for good box office are as constant as the ingredients for a loaf of bread and as predictable. Obviously, no one wants to put money into a film unless there is some certainty of getting the money back. But only about one in eight films ever cover their costs let alone make a profit, so it remains astonishing that entre- preneurs are stilt foolish enough to finance these mad, exotic dream-machines. No one is clear any longer as to who goes to the cinema or why. Rising costs and falling box- office returns, however, are gradually forcing a crisis which hopefully will wreck the cinema industry at it exists today; from the remnants, again hopefully, an art form less monopolistic and less union-bound will emerge.

The fact is that the tragedy of any director working in films is essentially that of a singular talent being caught up in a collective art; 'being seduced by a ridiculous medium', was how Orson Welles described it. Nonetheless, in spite of Peter Hall's alarming experience with the unauthorised re-editing of his Three into Two Won't Go by an American Tv producer, film is and always will be primarily a director's medium. It is he who will and must lead the revolt away from the monopolistic hierarchy which is at present stifling creativity. The problem is that the only apparently alter- native camp is so full of undiscipline and amateurishness that to move wholeheart- edly into the underground film world seems to some directors like committing profes- sional suicide.

Whatever else film and television may or may not be, they remain highly technical and therefore highly skilful occupations and such skill—let alone the ability to use that skill to advantage—does not grow on trees. But very few on the underground circuits believe this or want to believe it. Many underground film makers that I know think that three hours of out-of-focus, inconse- quential drivel will suffice. The cult of film, moreover, perpetuated by those who main- tain that the more obscurantist the message, the happeir the medium, is a further disad- vantage that the film maker has to suffer. His or her predicament is a difficult one.

Barbara Loden's film would never have been financed by the film industry proper. Already it is becoming a cult film which is damaging its fragile virtues. In technical quality it is dangerously close to that of many home-movies, which will doubtless encourage those whose talents hardly extend to viewable holiday snaps. But without Barbara Loden and her like, the film business must die an even noisier and self-pitying death than it is already.