Cinema
What Counted
By ISABEL QUIGLY
I'D like to see a book reviewer's face if you gave him several dozen books as oddly assorted as you could find them—fiction rang- ing from Robbe-Grillet to Ethel M. Dell, verse from Pound to Patience Strong, as well as tech- nical and informative books on any subject from herrings to Greek sculpture—and told him to list the best ten. For some years now, around . Christmas time, I've been falling in with the hoary old convention that requires a film critic to list his ten best films of the year. And now at last, astounded by the idiocy of the idea, I've struck. A film critic doesn't, like a book re- viewer, have films at roughly his 'level' given to him to notice. He sees more or less everything, and its range is about as wide as the one I've suggested for the appalled imaginary book re- viewer, So what, in the name of Absolute Values or anything else you like to think of, can his 'best ten' list consist of except •a scamper round the 'main' films that happen to have been shown in his country that year? Oh, of course, tastes vary, eccentricities and variations in values occur, and enough 'best tens' is something of an indication (as Richard Roud showed in Sight and Sound not long ago, in writing of the French Co/tiers boys) of which way the wind blows or the cookie crumbles in a particular place or milieu at a particular time. l3iit . . . unless you deliberately turn eccentric on the round-up day What, as a rule. can you list but the films that have turned up from the world's best directors?
Instead, I mean to look back and pick, with- out counting festivals and films shown outside the ordinary public run (that cuts out Visconti's Rocco and his Brothers, my vastest film experi- ence of the year), on this and that; what seemed to count, w hat Hiked. It wasn't a year of clear- cm movements. The French new wave had settled into something that no longer seemed a school, but just a loosely-knit, or' even unknit, group with talent—some remarkable, mostly not; but, as I felt last week when faced with the old guard en masse, a pleasant change if only of mood and tone. The Italians, with no fuss about w4ves, sent some masterpieces, 'huge and mighty rorms' compared with the nimbler French ones. Hollywood sat tight, but the outsiders broke through to us: Cassavetes, Lerner. British films went on, for the most part, having tea under the limes, except for Reizs's Saturday Night and Sun- day Morning, Losey's 7'he Criminal and Richard- son's The Entertainer. From Poland we had Wadja, from Argentina Torre Nillson; from the Past, Eisenstein's marvellous Iran Part 11, The Boym..,' Plot, and Carne's epitome of literary romanticism, Les Enfants du Paradis. My own favourites, those 1 loved best, responded to, re- Membered and would see again whenever I had the chance, were, first, Antonioni's L'Atwentura, h haunting film that combines the cerebral with the sensual as subtly and forcefully as ever I saw them combined, a film that hangs about the edges of memory and dream, reminding you of this and that, seeming to link w ith other pasts; Truffaut's Les 400 Coups, a masterpiece first go, instinctive, youthful, cinematic in its bones; And (assavetes's Shadows, that perfectly lives up to Its name—movinein a half-light, even techni- cally, probing, exploring, among so much that is half-formulated,, half-articulate — people, feel- ings, a borderline society. And that's enough, even of tentative, very personal lists. Outside all lists, the sadists and pornographers 'had a field- day, or rather a field-year, so that even the Times list of 'Picture Theatres' reads like a rather blue catalogue; and the Nazis, as ever, went on try- ing to look respectable (but more of that else- where). People, still ask: 'Seen any good films lately?' and my mind still goes blank each time they ask it. Film stars are still, on the whole, a dreadful delusion to meet; but it no longer feels Perverted to sit in the cinema at ten 'o'clock in the morning. My idea of really exotic cinema- going is now an evening show attended by real people eating chocolates, with trailers, news- reels and the ice-cream girl coming down between the rows.
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