Fighting for fish heads
Duncan FaHowell
Jonathan Livingston Seagull Director: Hall Bartlett. Star: Jack Couffer (cinematography). "1.l' ABC Blonnibury (97 minutes).
Percy's Progress Director: Ralph Thomas, Star: Leigh Lawson. 'X' A.:BC I Shaftesbury Avenue (101 Minutes).
Haven't we all at one time or another wanted to go from A to 2 Without passing through the intervening time-space? The Great Gull Chang, like great gulls throughout history, says you do it bY phenomenal concentration (quite different from thinking), absorption in the object not the subject. Alas, except for the abnormally_ fortunate, it takes years to discipline the relevant energy; in fact you have to be holy, which does not help London Transport's manpower crisis at all. However the fruits of the principle are with US all the time. A tennis player will say that the mind must be transferred to the ball; tactical questions can be considered there, and the more intense the absorption the better the results. With artists, Writers especially, things are made more difficult since they are unnaturally obsessed with their own minds. Poets in particular are debtors to a schizophrenia which gives them some perception of reality, then large amounts of Psychic vanity on top, obliging them to go off to a quiet place quite Often to wrestle with it. Visionary they may be but good eyesight is something they hardly ever have. This is called interpretation. Jonathan Livingston Seagull who spends three-quarters of the film named after him training himself into a flying ace was never satisfied With fish heads as gulls go for he is on the road to enlightenment. It is only when he realises that the place be is trying to fly to is one where you can literally loop through the gala.xies, if you wish, without napping so much as a feather that he actually makes it to perfect Speed, i.e., instantaneous transference. This irony is called the cosmic chuckle or the smile of the buddha. Yet it by no means invalidates Jonathan's passion for breaking flying records for it is very unlikely that you will ever be thoroughly turned on to everything unless you have been thoroughly turned on by something. What this is called I do not know but it is not Hall Bartlett's film which attempts to eat a cake it cannot recognise, at best a fanciful hope. The fault does not have much to do with Richard Bach's little book which broke records of a different sort. Fortuitously I read it on an aeroplane so you could say it was loaded, but against all the odds it is a true parable, with none of the screen version's ragbook didacticism or holier-than-thou smugness. The trouble lies somewhere in Hollywood which by definition is down there fighting for the fish heads. Bartlett attempts to do with seagulls what Kubrick did with spaceships. The first similarity is that Hall's gull voices all sound like products of the HAL computer in 2001, a fatal association since as soon as you hear these mellifluous, calming American tones the immediate reaction is not to believe a word. 20011s the symbolic 'sixties film and the only one to capture the ontological mystery which goes beyond astronomical geography. Stronger telescopes do not of themselves enlarge consciousness, merely information. Both pictures employ elaborate spatial effects to take your breath away and from there hopefully lead us into religious awe. But where Kubrick was oblique and suggestive, Bartlett imaginesothat you can touch ultimate truth through verbal description and visual parallels. The mentality of that is way off mark and it is interesting that Bach's strictly verbal creation should handle the non-verbal ideas so much better. We even have trip sequences, some natural wonders like Alaskan glaciers plugged into Piccadilly Circus for the occasion, which in the circumstances are no more than pretty to behold. Again the director assumes that if you have a shot of birds flying round rocks that lasts for ten minutes accompanied by an electronic rum-rum noise it will have us thinking gosh, so there is more to life than future shock and driving licences after all. It doesn't, it just makes you want to get behind and push it on. Nonetheless if you set aside that the film is about matters of which its makers in the event do not have an inkling and can stomach icecreams during the longueurs, then you will enjoy the remarkable aerial photography in the way you would a ride at Battersea fun fair. Even if it does not come together to create more than moments of exquisite titillation, someone has been quite extraordinarily ingenious in a helicopter. The problems of filming such a story are immense and many of these have been separately overcome, not forgetting the bird trainers eliciting very flashy wingwork. But whoever chose Neil Diamond to supply the music has summed up the film's central inadequacy in a gesture. Diamond has some good tunes to his name but not one of them finds its way into the cloying Las Vegas plastic piety of this score. As Jonathan soars towards bliss Mr Diamond's fallible voice moves into apoplectic overdrive. You can see veins bulge purple in his neck as he climbs a perilous scale to God. Then he does it again. And again. And you begin to think that nirvana does not come wrapped in rhine
stones and pink satin bows.
This week's tickler for fourth form nose-pickers, Percy's Progress, I shall mention as something which would be value for money if you could see it for a penny at the end of a pier. It is about a man suffering from priapism and the only harm it is capable of doing is to the reputation of the British film industry which can ill afford it and now seems to be inhabited almost entirely by sexual nincompoops.
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