Personal Quirks
By ISABEL The Time Machine. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) —High Time. (Carl- ton.)
THE autumn number of Sight and •Sound is a summer-up and stock- taker in such a wide sense that it seems a pity it will be read only by eineastes. The main article in the number, Penelope Houston's `The Critical Question,' could very well go into (say) one of the Sundays or a weekly review as something likely to interest all sorts, because it deals with the cinema in terms of life in general, and sets it in the present-day climate of opinion. It's about criticism, but in a very general sense: about attitudes to the cinema and their result in practice, in likes and dislikes, in what you look for in a film; and chiefly it's about the gap between 'committed' criticism, that (roughly) cares what the cinema's about, and 'esthetic' criticism that (roughly) doesn't. Advo- cates of (and more than advocates: passionate believers in) the first sort are the Sight and Sound generation and their, equivalents (roughly in age and attitude) outside the cinema: what Penelope Houston calls the Young Left, with 'its Osbornes and Weskers, its Bergers and Tynans'; advocates of the second, the French Cahiers du Cinema critics, cradle of the New Wave, and the youngest
Previous page
