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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 2. 1964.

New Cinema . . . — Unusual Films for Capital

page 6

New Cinema . . .

Unusual Films for Capital

This year promises to be not only an extraordinarily interesting but a remarkably full one for tne dedicated cineaste. With the large number of feature films to be screened not only in film society circles but commercially as well, there will probably be more out-of-the-ordinary films available in 1964 than in any other year.

The big event of the year will be the opening of Amalgamated's new Lido on March 20. This means that there is another outlet for those pictures which are offbeat enough to rely on a speeialist audience.

The Paramount has done sterling service until now and also has an interesting series of programmes for future screening. It would be unjust to ignore the trail blazing done by this theatre in the cause of the offbeat (and you mustn't judge a theatre's overall achievement by measuring against the worst pictures it shows). The presence of another specialist cinema in the city can only do good for both.

The Lido's first screening is of course, Divorzio Airitaliunu with Marcello Mastroiannl. It is a safe bet to predict that this will offer something not only to the "ordinary" cinema-goer but to the specialist as well. Directed by Pietro Germi it has a brace of awards, a strongly inventive and darkly humorous plot and should run for quite a while.

Salient's Film Reviewer Arthur Everard looks at coming films.

The Lido's programme for the rest of the year includes some films which, on the basis of overseas reviews and articles should be outstanding and some which will just as undoubtably be of curate's egg consistency (well of course, what else could you expect?)

Top interest lies in the two Ingmar Bergman comedies booked, the 1954 A Lesson in Love (with Gunnar Bjornstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Anderson) and The Devil's Eye (1960) with Bjornstrand, Bibi Anderson and Nils Poppe, and Jean Luc Godard's Its My Life (Vivre Sa Vie) one of The films of the nouvelle vague. Truffaut's Jules et Jim is at present screening in Auckland and later will make its dutiful appearance here also. De Broca's The Joker is one I am looking forward to eagerly—I still regard his Jeux D'Amour as the best comedy I have seen in recent years.

Among the others, the Sidney Lumet film of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (Katherine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson) is sufficiently off-beal to make the list, but others such as Duvivler's The Devil iind the Ten Commandments, the omnibus Seven Capital Sins (episodes directed by Vadim Godard, de Broca, Chabrol inter alia), Vadim's Vice and Virtue (based, but oh so remotely, on the Marquis de Sade) have a strong leaning towards the demands of the box office.

Following on the partially successful Les Amants and Une Vie Privee. Louis Malle's Frantic offers Jean Moreau again. Jean Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni appear in two films by Mauro Bolognini. La Viaccia and Bell'Antonio respectively, and the three stalwarts of French cinema appear together (Jean Gabin. Marline Carole, Francoise Rosay) in the "underworld comedy" The Counterfeiters of Paris.

The 1963 Cannes Festival winner Queen Bee (The Conjugal Bed) is also likely to be screened during the year—this gives us hope that we may see films shortly after their release overseas rather than ten to fifteen years later. And we do hope that shorts will be carefully selected to fit the programme and not just to fit in the time to the interval!

On the club front, the Wellington Film Society has just released its ? programme for the 1964 season. If you are a student you get a substantial reduction in the subscription rate. The most interesting items, on paper anyway, appear to be Paris Nous Appartient, Rouch and Morin's Chronique D'un Ete, the 1963 Jean Renoir Le Crime de M. Lange and the rescreening of Jean Cocteau's Orphee.

Hoffmann's Wir Wunderkinder and Rosen's All The King's Men were screened at Victoria last year. I do not really think they stand up to more than one viewing—the same is true for Cacoyannis' Stella (but I would still advise having a look at it.) As for The Te Kooti Trail (New Zealand, 1927) and The Boy Kamasenu (Gold Coast, 1961) we shall just have to take pot luck.

The standard of shorts seems somewhat higher than last year's though it would not be hard to better that dismally long short about Sir Edmund's and B.P.'s antarctic antics which filled in the programme with Zero de Conduite with early material. Lon Chaney Senior in excerpts from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, slapstick hero Larry Semon in The Stuntman as well as the most recent sophisticated cartoons The Little Island, The Scarecrow.

There will also be the usual monthly discussion group meetings at which the insistent viewer will get a chance to see some of the features missed in previous seasons, air his knowledge, progagate his beliefs and perhaps throw a bit of gummed up psychology or sociology into the vocal free-for-all afterwards.

And what about our dear and good friend the Victoria University Film Society? With the usual beginning of the year teething troubles once more safely behind it, the local is busy drawing up its year's programme (which means that you still have lime to send in suggestions).

Having given its all for the greater glory of Un Chien Andalou and Citizen Kane last year, V.U.F.S. has decided to concentrate its energies on the early classics of the cinema. It is almost certain that future programmes will be selected from Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky, Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Italian Straw Hat, Kameradschaft, Le Million, The Passion of Joan of Arc and so on.

This mean-s that the film goer who is determined to see all he can from all periods of the cinema (and is willing to risk failing a few units) can, with a little ingenuity make good his wish simply by travelling around the city a bit.