NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND_
TONY PALMER
Last Monday work began in Wales on a new film of Macbeth. 'Utilising the text of Shakespeare's famous play', as it is officially described, this version will be the product of two unusual bedfellows, Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan. Tynan claims that he has left the verse untouched and has added no additional dialogue. Polanski wants and has got a screenplay in which action not words dominate—soliloquys are cut to a minimum and speed is of the essence. Being filmed in Technicolor and Todd-ao, it is costing around £1 million, very little of which is being spent on the cast who are mostly unknowns. So unknown, in fact, that when the pre-production party was held a week ago to announce who was to play Lady Macbeth, the actress did not appear. Indeed, she could not appear because no- one, least of all Polanski, was quite sure who was to play the part. Still, as Mr Tynan pointed out at the time, this was not a fact of any particular interest.
Nor, probably, was the fact that the party was held in the wit, room of the Playboy Club, except that it is the Playboy Club who is financing the film. Hugh Heffner, it seems, has got interested in celluloid that has a high quotient and has set up a produc. tion company called with almost touching naivety, Caliban Films. Hints that the witches will be nude, according to Mr Tynan all huffing and puffing, should not be allowed to detract from the serious nature of the enterprise. Nor should the presence at the press party of one of the witches, encased in a gold lame shirt, conceal the undoubted skill of Mr Polanski. The witch got drunk, or merry as witches are wont to do, and be- gan throwing things around the place; it was soon discovered also that she wouldn't be able to play the part after all because she did not belong to Equity. Nonetheless, film- ing was only delayed for a week; it seems that Polanski—referred to by the production staff as God—needed time to conceive. 'I like sex and my work,' the associate producer told me, 'because I'm good at both. Playboy Productions are too far in now to pull out, iryou see what I mean,' he added.
I'm sure, however, that Polanski's version will be as stimulating as that of Orson Welles, although the latter was filmed in about the same time that it took to prepare the press party. (Twenty-three days, to be precise.) If one considers Polanski's back- ground—brought up in Nazi occupied Poland, mother disappeared in concentration camp, youth in Stalin dominated Poland, the gruesome murder of his wife, the paranoiac madness of Macbeth must be particularly in tune with his sensibilities. What I find curi- ous about Playboy's sponsorship and Polan- ski's directing, is the extraordinary old- fashionedness not of the textual interpreta- tion, which no doubt will be modernistic in outlook, but the methods being used to achieve that interpretation. By methods I mean the use of film cameras and film tech-
niques, because it seems to me clear that within a few years the film camera will seem as outdated a piece of gadgetry as the gas lamp is today. I was sent to film an inter- view with Orson Welles two years ago in Spain. My nervousness was not helped by the sudden and unscheduled breakdown of the camera in the middle or' our talk. Welles was not at all perturbed but merely voiced
the observation that it was almost unbeliev- able that the film industry, although now
about seventy years old, still relied on as clumsy a machine as the film camera. Admit- tedly, the thing was now made of plastic instead of concrete like the original proto.
types, but the basic mechanical action by which the celluloid is dragged through the shutter with a pair of tongs, has not im- proved one jot. Almost unbelievable, re- peated Welles, except that in the film industry such idiocies are absolutely commonplace.
Accordingly, the film camera must be re- placed if the cinema is to achieve any real technical development. Polanski himself re.
cently 'viewed an experimental test reel of super-3D with Bernard Delfont, and if Ber- nard Delfont is interested, then sooner or later it's bound to come our way. But 3n, Vistavision, Cinerama, these are all embellish- ments of film; the fundamental processes remain the same. The alternative, I believe, is to be found in the electronic camera. At present, we call this the television camera with all the social and cultural disadvantages that such a label involves. But experiments are now being carried out to make such a camera as portable and as flexible as any film camera. Already, the electronic camera has a thousand advantages; it needs less light; it can show the director what is being photographed immediately instead of those long nail-biting delays while the film is taken away to be developed; fifty takes of the same scene cost only the same as one take and what has been recorded can be replayed instantly to the actors who can therefore adjust their performances accordingly.
What has been lacking so far is the means by which to project onto a large screen what has been recorded. Obviously a picture the size of a television set (in a large cinema) would be ridiculous. A short term solution has been found with a process called vitro. nics, by which colour videotape is trans- ferred to colour film with minimum loss of quality and then projected in the cinema in the normal way. 'There are already two half- hour films being shown on the ABC circuit in this country and no one, as far as I know, has complained about their visual quality. Technicolor in America have such faith in the electronic camera and vitronics that twelve feature films are planned for 1971 in the States using this revolutionary technique. The unions, of course, are totally alarmed. Not only does the electronic camera cut the cost of making feature films in half but it drastically reduces the number of technicians required. Most lighting men, focus pullers and film graders, for example, would be re- dundant. But with the breakdown of regular Cinema-going and the gradual collapse of the traditional habits of film distribution, the way must be open to such technical develop- ments as these. Without them, the seventy per cent of all film technicians who at pre- sent are out of work will probably increase rather than diminish. And Mr Polanski, com- plete with entourage of huffing and puffing playboys, might well cast an eye towards the electronic camera as he plods up and down the Welsh hills with his film .crew—all 13C of them.
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