Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

FEEDNSAG TAKE ONE welcomes communications from its readers, but can rarely accommodate letters over 500 words in length. The editors assume that any letter received (unless otherwise Stated) is free for publication. Where to get it. We were recently made aware that your periodical made mention [Vol. 3 No. 4} of the MIT/Leacock Super 8 Sound System... for which we thank you. You also apparently made note that the camera/recorder combination costs $800. Wish we could, but raw cost is just about that. Nonetheless, Leacock has done for Super 8 what he did for 16mm and the time is now. Deliveries start this October. Hy Shaffer Hampton Engineering Associates Inc. 735 Providence Highway Norwood, Mass. 02062 Thank you for your recent [Vol. 3 No. 5] review of John Wilcock’s The Auto biography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol. However, we have taken over distribu tion of the book from Other Scenes, Inc. If any of your readers have trouble finding the book, they should contact us. Madeline Warren Hopkinson and Blake, Publishers 329 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016 A call for help. | am a twenty-one year old Puerto Rican woman creating and experimenting with 16mm film in New York City. Before entering college, while still in high school, | was introduced to filmmaking through membership in the Film Club on the Lower East Side. There | acquired basic film skills working with a 16mm Kodak Cine 100 camera. My first film called Pensamiento en Cinco (Thought In Five) is distributed through the Young Filmmakers Foundation at 43 West 16th St., N.Y.C., 10011. Soon after leaving the Film Club and entering college | realized that this new and different atmosphere would inhibit and paralyze my growth and fulfillment as a filmmaker. | returned to New York City and took various jobs to support myself while seeking opportunities to work in films. | gained more experience as assistant director and assistant editor of a feminist documentary called The Fifth Street Woman’s Building Film, a film by Jane Lurie. It was this film experience that increased my awareness of and respect for the medium’s social, political and educational power. 4 The power of film to impress upon an audience an understanding, an acceptance of a viewpoint, is what | wish to exercise while capturing aesthetically the love, hardships and struggles of my sisters. Some film opportunities for minority groups have begun to arise. But today, as in the past, the political emphasis in the arts is on the struggle for reaching manhood, and it is Puerto Rican men in the community who are encouraged to make films, and are assured of their potential as artists. They are the ones who take advantage of these opportunities. While we stay home caring for the children! If you can, please help me. Thank you. Send suggestions, financial support, equipment, information... etc. to this address: apt 2A, 41 West 16th St., N.Y.C. 10011 Marizel New York 10011 $3000 anyone? Your Don Siegel issue [Vol. 3 No. 4] just great. It’s always good to find a director who likes William Wellman’s stuff, and shares his attitude towards his own work. At 40¢ you are still the best bargain in film magazines, and one of the few that hasn’t succumbed to outright trendy glossiness, like Cinema or Film Comment. Question: Do you know where | can lay my hands on a rental print of Wild Boys of The Road? (in the US.) It’s a Wellman movie with Frankie Darro. Fine, brutal filmmaking. One thing: putting Siegel on the cover was more than his due, but why give Bogdanovich top billing for a shitty little introduction and Kaminsky no cover space for a top-notch interview? That’s becoming sneaky. Watch it. | am finishing a 35mm feature right now, entitled Mounier’s Syndrome. I’ve been working in 16mm for a good while, and then | got a grant from the N.J. State Arts Council so | went ahead and did this. Believe it or not, the whole thing (74 minutes long) will be in workprint form with mag track (all shot with direct sync sound) for about $1750. This involves quite a good number of sets, complicated dolly work, a large cast, and a plot that moves from the 1800’s Paris to London 1964. The film is Cocteau on a Corman (early Corman) budget. | need $3000 to wrap it up for dubbing, negative cutting, and final prints. Wheeler Dixon Grad. School of Education Rutgers University New Brunswick, N.J. 08903 Armageddon is our beat. Does TAKE ONE really need a series of two and three sentence synopses of the sexism, racism and general fascism in Current feature films? “Hollywood Is Our Beat” is an insulting waste of space. It serves no function; it contains no news or reviews, just a series of unsupported opinions. It is not even consistent within its own absurdly limited framework: Macbeth is berated for its violence while Tales from the Crypt — which features a wife hacking her husband into little pieces — is called ‘“‘good-time horror’. | recommend that you drop this column immediately. The opinions expressed in that column are much better dealt with in an article like Mr. Goodwin’s ‘Tooling Up for Armageddon”. Mr. Goodwin's despair seems to stem from ‘‘near-pornographic attention to detail’ regarding the violence in the films under discussion. That’s a very interesting concept. An attention to detail is required for pornography; it is also required for poetry. It is just such attention that does set The Wild Bunch apart from nearly any B Western made since The Great Train Robbery. Macbeth is another case. Mr. Goodwin is being entirely misleading. Polanski does indeed bring the murder of the king on screen, but much of the violence of the play, such as the killing of the king’s guards and even Lady Macbeth’s suicide, takes place off camera. It is primarily Polanski’s skill as a director, not gratuitous bloodshed, that gives the film its harrowing aura of violence. His are the only filmed characters of the Mr. & Ms. to maintain the psychological and emotional coherence and development required by the play and fumbled so many times before. Gary Alan Aspenberg New York 10028 (Next issue: The great Armageddon debate continues. ) Zorn re-zorned. Let a literary type add something to the alphabet soup. First of all, there’s another Zorn [see N.Y. Letter in Vol. 2, No. 8 and Feed-Back in Vol. 3, No. 2], not to be found in the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedic Dictionary. His name was John Zorn: he was a Bavarian botanical writer, and he lived 17391799. Second, | have two hypotheses about the phrase ‘Zorn’s Lemma’. Since a secondary meaning of ‘lemma’ is ‘a small chaffy bract inside and above the glumes in a spikelet of grass’, | suggest that somewhere in his writings Zorn describes such a thing. Or, ‘Zorn’ and ‘lemma’ may have appeared in the Same crossword puzzle, e.g. ‘Early century, but late alphabet, writer’. Thirdly, Zorn’s Lemma_ employs asyndetic syntax. Other alphabetstructured works, such as Anthony Burgess’s novel MF are syndetic and