Film Culture (February 1958)

Reisz) revealed a characteristic evening at a jazz club. A simple story line followed a butcher, a hairdresser, and a cleaning girl as they met their partners and joined some “Teddy Boys” for an evening of music and dance. The film highlighted a series of slight romantic and humorous incidents. As in Nice Time, the camera was a casual spectator, focusing upon the passing moment and letting it speak for itself. The people—the musicians and dancers, the shy, the bold, the slummers—were pleasantly observed but there was a singular note of passivity in the treatment. (Or was it merely British restraint?) Except for a small flare-up of dramatic interest—a mutual misunderstanding by one couple and seyeral touches of humor, particularly a dancing couple preoccupied with continually circling around each other. the result was objectivity to the point of remoteness. However, underlying the jazz enthusiasm which brought the participants together was a significant commentary: the need of the individual to be part of something vital, to be hep, to belong. But because of the general lack of definition, the point seemed overextended and weakened. One is bound to compare the film’s lack of forcefulness with the vigorous statement of a previous motion picture, Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton), which handled the same material. In this latter film, objectivity was given eloquence by a careful selection of camera angles. In addition, emphasis upon pattern and rhythms of cutting and a deeper feeling for cinematic organization helped communicate the point of the film more effectively. Together (Lorenza Mazzetti and Denis Horne) was a bare, straightforward account of the solitary life of two young men—deaf-mutes. What they saw and did— and by implication, occasionally what they felt—was photographed in a series of diary-like sequences, objective and restrained in tone. The mutes were shown as outsiders, lonely and misunderstood, living in a narrow world of silence. They moved about their dingy, crowded, rented room in quiet routine, ate their meals with the landlady’s family in an atmosphere of suppressed impatience, walked through bomb-torn streets subjected to the grimacing taunts of children, did their work in speechless isolation from fellow dock-workers, and at the end were separated by death when one of them was accidentally pushed over a bridge to drown without his companion or anyone else ever hearing his struggles or learning what has happened to him. The subject was an unusual one, the most personal on the program. The camera detailed the obscurity of the men’s lives without slighting one or the other. But what might have been poignant and genuine often emerged contrived and cynical. The cold objective treatment of the characters tended to oversimplify them. They appeared to be aloof, indifferent to their own dilemma. In the film-makers’ ruthless attempt to avoid any narrative or dramatic structure which might have emotionalized the incidents, the scenes became drawn out and monotonous, the tempo tedious; the sequences lacked climax, often ending abruptly. The one exception to this flat detached treatment was a dream sequence. The younger of the mutes, who had seen a dancer at the fair grounds and then at a bar. later dreamed of loving and being loved by her. They moved back and forth locked in a tight embrace, round 10 and round, caught up in a rhythmic flow not unlike some primitive ritual. Their scene ended with the mute awakening to see his companion pouring cold water into a washbasin. Photographed in a manner that was part real, part fantasy, the sequence was a passage of genuine warmth and poetic feeling. It fused emotion and concept into a unique cinematic expression. One wished the entire film had displayed such feeling, insight, and vividness. O Dreamland (Lindsay Anderson and John Fletcher ) proved to be a sardonic comment upon popular culture. It contrasted the nightmare world of tawdry distractions at an amusement park with the apathetic search of its motley group of pleasure-seekers. People stared aimlessly at life-sized mechanical models featuring Joan of Are burning at the stake, the hanging of a criminal, the execution of the atom spies, torture devices through the ages, and similar historical horrors. This pageant of shocking displays was accompanied by the mocking laughter of twitching puppets, frenzied outbursts of grimacing gargoyles, and the strident leers of penny-in-the-slot viewers of suggestive peep-shows. The violence of sound and image assaulted the seemingly dead sensibilities of the listless crowds with a kind of perverse pleasure. In contrast to the mild impressionism of the previous pictures, O Dreamland was charged with a rampant emotional expressionism. Camera and microphone were used in counterpoint to bypass the superficial look of the subject and to inject a meaning. Frankie Laine’s raucous “I believe” blasted the ear while the screen showed a lion pacing his cage like some strange animal out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. “Kill me—thrill me” passionately pleaded Muriel Smith in a sultry voice, while space ships darted across each other in frenzied flight and pursuit. Startling camera angles, unexpected juxtapositions of viewpoint, suggestive distortions, deft, on-the-beat cutting, and the emphatic contrast between what was seen and what was heard gave the film a hardhitting, bravura impact. Every Day Except Christmas (Lindsay Anderson, Leon Clore, and Karel Reisz) was a portfolio of honest, direct, unsubtle, and sometimes strong portraits of the night workers in the Covent Garden market, a chronological account of the way flowers and produce arrive at the market, are displayed and sold. Men and milieu were handled with sympathy and understanding. But the picture’s force was always descriptive. The film moved from person to person and what we got was a series of low-keyed sketches of English workers at the market, sometimes hardly looked at, sometimes more directly glanced at, and occasionally—as in the instances of the old lady porter and the old-time buyer—really and roundly seen. Although conventional in treatment, the film was lifted by the warmth and insight of such scenes. as those in the restaurant where the merchants gathered for teaand-sausage breaks and, at the end, where poor street vendors bargained for leftovers. What stood out above all in these five works of Free Cinema was a real concern for people as individuals. The old guard of British documentary primarily dealt with issues: housing, health, labor, education, politics. Today’s British film-makers focus upon human beings— people who are obscure, lonely, isolated in a world of