Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

family: he sleeps with the ideal mother, and seems at the close of the film to be reconciled with the ogre father. Malle attempts rather frantically to show that incest will not cripple Laurent’s desire for “normal” sex, having him rush off that same evening to sleep with someone his own age. To the extent that this action does not make him a merely random seducer, it succeeds in affirming the almost metaphysical nature of the incest, its status as idea rather than physical act. Through the agency of maternal sex, the family has once again been made whole. Whatever one feels about the means employed for re-establishing familial integrity, it is clear that Malle has contradicted that theme of flight which lies most deeply within him, and which, one may hope, will reappear after all this falsely imposed harmony has been THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT SHORTS are from GROVE PRESS Lenny Bruce in Thank You Masked Man “The greatest short ever made.” — Rolling Stone The Bed “Broughton’s finest film, by far.” — Stan Brakhage Naughty Nurse “Hilarious satire on sex fetishes” — N.Y. Post Minitaurus “A wildly comic tale about a young man and the women who love him” — Variety Paint forgotten. Michael Silverman First Prize Oberhausen Festival GEN ESIS | Pianissimo ; Carmen D’Avino's classic, Academy Award Genesis Il offers a good cross sectional view of the fast-surfacing American underground film. It contains fourteen films from thirty seconds to eighteen minutes in length, and like all pot-pourris of film they range from brilliant to flat and trite. As | can’t review them all individually in this space Ill point to the worst and the best. Two of the longer films represent the weakness of underground film, its tendency to stretch a limited idea and assume that the abstract in art works easily in film. Thus E Pluribus Unum (13 min.) plays with woman’s power over men using a fish-eye camera and the old tried and true chase scene. For brief instants it is Daliesque or gripping but it wears thin despite a clever sound track. Project 1 (13 min.) is in much the same bag except that Jim Morrison’s song gives it a sudden kick part way through. Yet even these ‘worst of the bunch’ films have a flow of image and sound which suggests where film could go. On the bright side of Genesis I! are the shorter films and the animation. The Unicycle Race is a brilliant drawnon-film animation and it is set to a superb high speed rhythmic score. Herman uses the dry lecturer-psychologist against an hilarious one minute animated picture and Bambi Meets Godzilla is one of the greatest quick jokes ever animated. Demonstration Movie is the final total put-down of all those awful instructional movies you've ever seen. All of these films work a single idea quickly, clearly and brilliantly, showing how the human imagination outdistances a great deal of technical schmaltz in filmmaking. Two: other items in the package deserve special mention. Retreat is an anti-war film whose juxtaposition of nominee Man and Dog Out for Air “Brilliant and astonishing” — Film Quarterly Zuckerkandl The acclaimed and enormously witty slash at the middle-class syndrome of non involvement. Andromeda An erotic legend of the land of Lesbos The Griffith Report The spoof discovery of a previously unknown D.W. Griffith film. The End of Summer Satirizing avant-garde film clichés. Fuses “Carolee Schneemann’s notorious erotic masterpiece.” — The Guardian Coke Bottle & Apple Knockers An early sexploitation piece with a very young and very beautiful Marilyn Monroe. Out of the Blue Document of an electronic daydream (nightmare) as stag movies are inadvertently broadcast over a commercial television Station. PLUS — Brakhage, Deren, Emshwiller, Kubelka, Maas, Peterson, Tambellini, Tourtelot, VanDerBeek, Weiss. WRITE FOR COMPLETE CATALOGUE OF OVER 400 FILMS Grove Press film Division 53 EAST 11 STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10003 (212) 677-2400 and runs the Guelph Free Film Theatre. 34 een tog Sa ENE My Ve Sa a og LA eC od Peter Brigg teaches modern drama at the University of Guelph image and sound shows what they can do for each other in film. There is a closing zoom effect in this film which shows technique perfectly wedded to theme. Campus Christi is the longest film in the set and the best sustained, primarily because it is cleverly scripted to send up every religious cliché. Its comedy is both visual and intellectual, with hair-raising sight gags (the modern Christ being crucified on a gigantic peace symbol) sharing space with digs at Kierkegaard. Stews are always tasty, and Genesis Il (distributed in the US by Directions Unlimited and in Canada by Crawleys) is a film ragout. It has a few odd lumps but the overall achievement is the presentation of a bit of all sides of the off-beat film scene. From a twentieth century hip Christ through inspired animation to studies in sexuality, Genesis Il brings it all through distorted lenses, electronic sound, and exciting experiments in colour. The whole package has imagination and, when it is controlled, we get encouraging suggestions of the possible range of film media. Peter Brigg SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE A Universal release (1972) of a George Roy Hill-Paul Monash Production. Color. 104 mins. Producer: Paul Monash. Director: George Roy Hill. Executive Producer: Jennings Lang. Screenplay: Stephen Geller, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Director of Photography: Miroslav Ondricek. Music: Glenn Gould. Film Editor: Dede Allen. Cast: Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Valerie Perrine,. Roberts Blossom, Sorrell Booke, Kevin Conway. Slaughterhouse Five, directed by George Roy Hill, is in many ways a charming and enchanting movie — which should be a fairly damning comment. Billy Pilgrim-is a 50s Boy Scout type. He is grinning and naive, faithful to his wife and dog, president of the Lion’s Club, and an optometrist because he feels it is his way to help people. He is so sweet you want to kick him: the epitome of the American Dream — successful but unspoiled, Christian and loving down to his toenails. Ah, but poor Billy has been traumatized by his one dose of reality — he was a POW during the firebombing of Dresden. Fortunately, Billy meets the fate he deserves: he is floated away to the mystical and mysterious planet of Tralfamadore, where he sees all time and all things as one, accepts life and impregnates Montana Wildhack. Montana is, by the way, an “actress/dancer” and a far superior sex object to his fat earthly wife. Billy dies violently, but in peace and harmony with all things. And the lesson of the bombing of Dresden is to accept the horrors and absurdities of earth in Billy’s kindly, if confused style, and perhaps you too will someday be carted off to a heavenly planet where it will All Make Sense. — It is the fairytale ending that blunts the impact of the movie, and which absolves us from dealing with the very