General Knowledge
By ISABEL QUIGLY Sergei Eisenstein. (Every- man, Hampstead.)— The Chaplin Revue. (London Pavilion.)— Black Orpheus. (Cur- zon.) `As perfect in its timing as Eisenstein?s pram,' the prince of Lampedusa calls a remark made by a character in his novel, The Leopard, in 1862.
What other film image Could be invoked as casually, without explana- tions, certain of its effect? The Odessa steps sequence of The Battleship Potemkin isn't just bit of the cineaste's private jargon. It's a °it of general knowledge, common imagery, citable without affectation : the pram jolting' down the steps, the baby in it wailing for its 'nether shot down at the top of them, the old Woman's shattered glasses, the line of implacable feet, over and over again cutting across the wildly ' Panicking faces and bodies, technique and inten- • t!011 so perfectly matched, propaganda so bril- ' "allay and feelingly used, that you take it at all ' sorts of levels of appreciation, all sorts of degrees of heat or maybe think `Sharpeville,' or some- thing of the kind, which presumably is what , cisenstein would most have hoped. You can see it' anyway, in a forty-five-minute life of Eisen- , 3_tein which manages to pack, in spite of a ludi- crows line-toeing commentary, all sorts of splen- did moments you would have to go a long way, tl.r wait a long time, to find : bits from his first urn, Strike, in which his style is already so recog- isable that it seems to have appeared full-grown; from Potemkin, of course, and October (caption- less, these score: I remember dramatic moments 'n both spoilt by irreverent guffaws at the language); the battle on the ice froft Alexander Nevsky, and some of the sombre magnificence of both !vans; some moments from his unfinished Mexican film, and plenty of his drawings. 'Un- forgettable' is a glib word, but it really applies here; Eisenstein's view of things, like no other director's, really sticks, not so much in one's head as in one's bones, becomes part of the secondary layers of memory, so that things I hadn't seen for fifteen years I remembered far more clearly when they turned up here than the film I'd just come from that same afternoon : grandeur as far beyond the caption's propaganda as it is beyond political quibble at this end.
Then there is Chaplin : three short films of his not to be missed by man, woman, child or (I almost said) dog, -since dogs have as human a place there as the average person. Where on earth did Chaplin find so many grotesques, or is it just that everyone in the Twenties looks grotesque to our eyes? Hugely fat, or dwarfish, or lumpy, fantastically bearded or moustached or hatted, and all with that oddly crumpled look, as if they'd slept in their clothes, they look like Vigo's nightmares shown straight and in broad daylight. Chaplin is seen as tramp, escaped con- vict disguised as parson, and soldier in the trenches. Satire in the war film on our-view-of- the-Germans seems highly up-to-date and it is hard to believe the tiny monocled maniac bossing his enormous whiskery giants preceded Goebbels (appearance) and Hitler (personality) in time. I could have done without the jazzing-up of the sound track, but nothing really much matters when you have Chaplin in action.
The new wave, as more of its ripples reach us, turns out to refer more to newness of talent than of technique: it means, I mean, that there are lots of new directors, but not necessarily lots of new directions, in France. Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus (`A' certificate) at any rate, for all its prizes (Cannes, Oscar) and all its fuss, turns out to be pretty old-fashioned (as well as old- fashionedly pretty) both technically and spirit- ually, if spirits have fashions, which I don't see why not; a pleasant love story set against the carnival at Rio, with a spectacularly handsome coloured cast and costumes and scenery, but nothing the least bit orphic about it except the names. After all, you can call any pair of lovers you like Orpheus and Eurydice, or Tristan and Isolde, or the owl and the pussycat, if you want to, but it doesn't necessarily give them any of the right attributes or make anyone else believe in their legendary qualities I haven't any preju- dices. for or against, the modernising of legends, and nor, it would seem, has M. Camus, to whom a tram driver called Orpheus and a Eurydice electrocuted on the tram wires seem to mean just that and nothing else. You can take a big dog and call him Cerberus, but it doesn't necessarily make you think of the underworld. You can dress up a carnival reveller as a skeleton but it isn't necessarily macabre. You can show a man search- ing for his lost love without the faintest of orphic overtones. Which is odd, when you think how suggestive—how almost over-exaggeratedly suggestive—a medium the film can be. As a rule it is all too easy to get the creeps, catch the hints intended, see mystery even. where it isn't; but not here. This is an attractive boy-meets-girl story and no more, with everything full of charm, but slow, deathly slow and repetitive till the charm itself grows monotonous Someone walks down- stairs and takes just that turn too many : or a gesture is repeated just that much too often; or something which at first sight seemed astonishing turns into a merely tiresome cavorting of shapes and colours. The music is so persistent it kills its effect; the colours, at first magnificent, end by making you long for a glimpse of mono- chrome; and the highpowered carnival seemed to last a great deal longer than all night. And even the whole setting of its mood and feeling was one big cliché: desperate man amid frenzied gaiety, terror amid shrieks of laughter, breaking hearts and grinning faces, etc. etc. Nor is there even anything touching about what ought to be an affecting contrast. Just pretty views, pretty faces, pretty colours, and a style of direction so pretty it makes you (well me) think, for contrast or simple cussedness, of unpretty things that may be beautiful or pleasing: a grumpy reaction to visual indigestion from a marshmallow view of the world.
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