Take One (Jan 1978)

en ee Ee ee a er BOOKS analytical models and proposes new taxonomies, however partial or incomplete, to allow fuller access to the discipline as it exists today. Though none of these texts can hope to satisfy all teachers and students of film, Lehman provides some interesting new insights into two films by John Ford; Braudy’s sections on the musical and on film acting should be basic reading; and Monaco provides the clearest account of film technology and the best glossary of terms to appear in a manual for film study so far. While one might wait for the Lehman chapters to be anthologized, the Braudy and Monaco texts deserve inclusion in any serious film student’s library for these elements alone. David Clandfield David Clandfield teaches film at the University of Toronto. OOOO Oe Sas>4>s1 King Lear: The Space of Tragedy dy Grigori Kozintsev. Translated by Mary Mackintosh. University of California Press, 272 pages. Illustrated. $14.95. It’s like having Kozintsev at your elbow for a shot-by-shot replay of the magnificent film he made of King Lear. This book is Kozintsev’s diary kept from 1968-72 as he planned and proceeded with his film. As we know from his earlier volume of essays and diary, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience (Hill and Wang: 1966), Kozintsev’s mind ranges across a vast literature when he approaches a work. One can mine the present volume for extended discussions of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Blok, Meyerhold, or Mifune, Kurosawa, Teshigahara, Eisenstein, and Peter Brook, or Brecht, Gordon Craig, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, or such topics as Ikebana (the sacrificial cruelty of flower arranging!), the Mask, music in film, time and space on stage and screen. And everywhere the author is intensely engaged with Shakespeare, as if the whole world came to brighter life when viewed through the prism of its greatest dramatist. The book demonstrates how much of the artist goes into his work. It’s as if everything that Kozintsev ever read or saw was preparation for his master work. There are delightful anecdotes. Like how Kozintsev turned Russia inside out trying to find a Lear. He found one in the Estonian actor, Yuri Yarvet, who had only come in to play beggar Tom. Kozintsev saw his Lear in Yarvet’s eyes. Yarvet laughed when he was called back to Leningrad to screen test for the starring role, but he went anyway, and ended up giving one of the most brilliant performances in film. The book is sometimes slow reading, because Kozintsev’s mind moves so fast; his lightning ellipses often take contemplation. The translation is not without its obscurities, though we are well-served with footnotes to explain unfamiliar allusions. Allin all, this is a splendid reminder of how intensely a man of culture can engage all his knowledge, intuition and humanity in making a movie. Maurice Yacowar RY Maurice Yacowar ts associate professor of English and Drama at Brock University, and author of Hitchcock’s British Films and Tennessee Williams and Film. ee Alexander Kluge & The Occasional Work of a Female Slave ed. by Jan Dawson. A Perth Film Festival Publication, 1975. 48 pp. $2.50. Wim Wenders 4y Jan Dawson [trans. by Carla Wartenberg). A Festival of Festivals Publication, Toronto, 1976. 32 pp. $2.50 (In the U.S. both pamphlets are available from N.Y. Zoetrope. In Canada, Wim Wenders is available through Cine Books.] i For most of us in North America, European movies mean the films of France, Italy, and Sweden. Since the mid-60s, however, an extraordinary number of inter Take One Magazine, Box 1778, Station B, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3B 3L3 We NEED YOU YO WELD Us EXPOSE TAKE ONE Do you know of a newsstand or store where Take One ought to be on sale—but isn’t? Send us the complete name and address (including zip), and—for your help in getting Take One valuable exposure before the filmgoing public—we will extend your subscription by a whole extra year, absolutely free. Send those names and addresses to: Peter Lebensold, Publisher, esting films have come out of West Germany; and Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schléndorff, and Werner Herzog are increasingly becoming filmmakers we have to deal with. When Jan Dawson was in Toronto in October ’76 to organize the German section of Toronto’s marathon Festival of Festivals, I asked her when these films got started; how, in fact, they first hit the air. Well the very first film was made in 1966 and the air which it hit was the Venice Film Festival. The film in question was called Yesterday Girl and it was directed by Alexander Kluge, whose first feature film it was. However, it didn’t come out of the air. It came out of a strong ideological and economic base. In 1962, a group of German short filmmakers had launched a now quite celebrated manifesto during the Oberhausen Film Festival in which they’d provocatively declared things like: The old cinema is dead—long live the new! And perhaps more important, they’d included in their manifesto a statement which read: We are prepared collectively to take economic risks. One of the first results of their attempts to get facilities for independent production was the establishment of something in Germany called the Kuratorium of Young German Film, which acted as an agent for financing first What better way of helping North America’s favorite film magazine—and yourself— at the same time? 45