Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

Wexler behind the camera, Medium Cool. to them. They talk about how they became radical, how they worked in the movement, what the movement is like, etc. There’s a priest who now says that the only way is the armed struggle. And a corporation lawyer whose whole family was tortured, whose chauffeur was tortured. He was taken in because he refused to divulge the private conversations he had had with some students he had defended. Maybe |’m wrong, but the first impression people seem to have of the film is an impression of depression — that so many horrible things could be done by some human beings to other human beings. When | first showed the rushes to some friends, | got some interesting comments. Someone said, “That guy doesn’t come off too well in the film. What he’s saying doesn’t seem sincere.” Well, she was right. One of the guys just had a manner of speaking and looking that was less convincing. But | know he was telling the truth; all his companeros were there, and he couldn't possibly have invented all those fantastic factual things. So here are real people in a real life situation, speaking directly to the camera, and we evaluate them like actors. Once it’s reduced to a medium like film or tape, we automatically make a theatrical judgment. We made them when we were cutting the film. Even though there’s very little manipulation in the cutting — it’s just interviews interspersed with some demonstrations of the tortures by the people who had been tortured — we still had to say, “Well, is it better to have a woman here and a guy there or should he say this here or there?” In other words, the degree of manipulation, even through the most honest hands, is still considerable. One of the things that showing the dailies did was convince me that when something is reduced to a medium, taken out of reality, it becomes subject to a theatrical evaluation. Nobody gives a shit if it’s real anyway, because if you can do it better theatrically you can be more convincing than if you did it actually. However, a number of people who were mentioned in the film have been neutralized, have been removed from their positions of authority — primarily because they tortured one too many Catholic priests. The chief of the Department of Public Safety in Sao Paolo has been removed. That’s sort of exciting, because it’s not a situation where you make a dream and present that dream to other people, and if your dream registers in their heads then maybe something will be changed, but a physical, factual thing. There may be some kid in the prison at Sao Paolo who, because we investigated the tortures in Brazil and made a film on the subject, won't be tortured, or will be given four minutes of the electric shock instead of the two-month extended treatment. Who knows? But to me that’s important. And, in another way, I’m sort of unhappy about the film, because |’m a filmmaker and | would like to make a film that pleased me more egotistically. | mean, it’s not cinema. There’s this fantastic girl, Maria, who tells this scene where they got her in the room and they stripped her naked and played this loud Macumba music, and they put on masks and turned on flashing lights, and then they put this alligator on her body. And |’m looking at her while she’s saying it, and | should cut to it. “Why don’t you shoot it? Why don’t you show it in the movie?’ Well, | suppose | could, but then it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t be honest. It’s really a dilemma. As a filmmaker | always think, why use words when it can be seen in images? (We discussed polemical and didactic films.) | think we, as audiences, are corrupted. After all, in literature you can pick up an essay, a short story, a novel — the varieties are tremendous. Whereas in film, the commercial is the most important cinema that people see. You can see. the goddamn news, and the announcer says, “The Pentagon Papers this and this, and 200,000 people were that and that,”’ and then he says, “We'll bring you the rest of the news after this important message.” Now the fact that he tells you it’s an important message is not what makes it important. What makes it important is the fact that he will not say the news which he knows, which is in his hand, until he says this other thing. Television is a show for commercials. | don’t care how strong you are politically or ideologically, if you’re brought up on television, commercials are goddamned important. And commercials work on you, they reach out and grab at you and claw at you and you don’t have to think, you just sit back and let ’em lap all over you and lick you all over and slap at you, whereas the kind of film you’re talking about you’ve got to work with, you've got to listen to, you've got to think about. You’ve got to be alive. There’s a conditioning that we're all a part of: we get bored pretty goddamned easy. And this relates to the political film, the didactic film. Like | was bored by a lot of Hour of the Furnaces. | respected it, and | knew it was telling it like it is, telling it like it had never been told in films before, and | Knew | was in the presence of a very important film. Yet | found myself, a number of times, just getting bored. And | resented that in myself. But don’t you think it’s important, particularly for someone in your position, who can get people to look at films, to give people like these Brazilians a forum? Even if it is talky. It seems to me that there’s this whole myth built up about. what’s cinematic and what’s not which, to me, is bullshit. If someone is saying something important, and it happens to be in movie form, then that’s cinematic. One of the most engrossing films I’ve ever seen was a guy talking to the camera for an hour and a half, Terry Whitmore, For Example. | agree with you intellectually, but if you want to reach the largest audience you can’t ignore the forms of the commercial. It’s a horrible, deadly thing. And | think one of the ways you combat the stranglehold that commercials have on our receptivity is to make forays into films that defy that form. It’s like introducing a different food into the diet. After a while, if it’s served up tastily, you could come to accept it. Whereas, if you never see it, or experience it, you won't ever get used to it. (We talked in pejorative terms about Carnal Knowledge. Haskell said: “The film became what the Nicholson, character was.’’) | think The Confession was one of the better-made political films as far as political films in theatres are concerned. | had some big arguments with a lot of my left-wing friends about the film. | don’t think it’s an anti-Communist film. The film was banned temporarily in Chile, and CostaGavras went there secretly to speak to the people in the party. He told them that the film was a statement against any oppressive state, and about the varieties of methods a state can use to control people. And | agree with this. Almost any state — socialist or capitalist — has to begin to push people around, whether it’s through persuasion or torture, they have to steal from people’s freedom. 17