CINEMA
The Demon Camera
The Round-Up. (Academy One, 'X' certificate.) —Lilith. (International Film Theatre, 'X' certificate.)
TIIE chief barrier to the cinema becoming a viable art-form seems to be the camera. If only it were not such a slave, if only it would give its director that essential resistance which paint gives the painter, words the writer; if only it would not so primly, so rigorously tell the truth about everything it sees, tearing the veil of the imagination, exposing a delicate sleight-of- hand to the banal light of day. It is as if you accompanied a production of Hamlet with a tone- less voice explaining in White Paper English how things were in fact at the court of Denmark at the time, or hung a colour transparency of Pet- worth Park in front of Turner's painting. Because this ostensible slave, this inveterate teller of the truth, is in reality a Mephistopheles: it will bring you life unadulterated on demand, mountains, concubines, kingdoms, whatever you ask for, and steadily erode your interest in them; and its meticulous truth about surface appearances will turn out to be worth nothing beyond the celluloid it is printed on.
Most directors are content to play Faust : they sell their souls, take their mountains, concubines and whatever, pass two hours of their audience's time, and ride well-heeled into the abyss. Others struggle a little before they are overpowered, and the few, the very few, succeed in outwitting their egregious slave. Miklos Jancso and Robert Rossen, who directed two of last week's new films, are both in their different ways strugglers.
.Jancso in The Round-Up makes a determined attempt to throw his enemy the camera off bal- ance by setting it at odds with the subject. But it is too simple a scheme to upset such an old campaigner. The subject is the interrogation, the mental and physical beating-down of prisoners by an all-powerful authority, the prisoners here being Hungarian bandits of the 1860s, their in- terrogators the police. The pictures are brightly lit, spaciously composed; shite stone walls and new wood emphasise cleanliness; rough peasant clothes and sober uniforms make contrasts in simplicity; an endless plain and the wind that blows over it ruffling the plumes on police hats spell airy freedom. Unerrir.gly, with slavish bril- liance, the camera establishes a mood of detached innocence. Now comes the crunch. If Jancso can at the same time establish the diabolical, black misery of the encounter between police and bandits he ill have the camera on the hip: he will have put in question its version of the truth, sown doubt in our minds, brought about the necessary artistic tension. But, alas, he is hoist with his own petard. The camera records his prisoners and their interrogators with the same beady eye that rested on their surroundings: they are all part of the composition, they move in lines. circles. stand in triangular groups, contrast with buildings as the director has told them to. The subject is neither here nor there. The director has asked his camera to put his actors in the same detached pictures as the setting; the camera has obliged, and whether it is a policeman, a prisoner or an actor under the hat is all one—it is the flut- tering taketh us.
Jancso, in other words, has fallen into the pit specially preserved for 'art' directors. With his lesser brethren, one of whom we are just coming to, it is usually a simple matter of the camera's 'truthfulness' exposing the artificiality of a tatty tale; but Jancso has said this will be an artistic conception through and through,' and the camera never lies: 'he has said, this will be an artistic conception through and through.' it says. In spite of the pretty compositions, this is an alienating and, after a few minutes, boring film, and I would recommend anyone to use his own eyes in Hyde Park or on Haworth Moor sooner than lend them for The Round-Up.
With Robert Rossen's Li/it!, we are indeed down among the lesser brethren. As with that other recent American film, A Thousand Clowns, we witnessed the depressing spectacle of certain comfortable, commercial insiders trying to puzzle out what it would be like to be an outsider, so in Ulla; we cringe before the misguided attempt of an outsider to portray sensitivity, intelligence and the artistic temperament. Aided and abetted by the dialogue, the camera exposes all with merciless efficiency. It dwells coldly on the actress tootling on her flute, to signify musical talent; on the same actress rubbing at a canvas, to signify artistic talent; it runs with practised aplomb through the sunlight-on-rippling-water sequence, to signify young love's idyll; and often rests with a sort of malevolent satisfaction on the unsuit- able features of the actor cast as sensitive hero. If you are bent on travelling the road paved with good intentions, your camera knows the way better than most.
HENRY TUBE
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