The Magic Flute

Director Ingmar Bergman

Lido Cinema

All the stage arts ask an imaginative [unclear: volvement] of the audience surpassing [unclear: nything] required by film. Painted [unclear: cenery], for example, must be accepted as the thing it represents. Film shows he thing itself. A change in stage scenery [unclear: ndicates] a change in place, whereas [unclear: ilm], by a cut, can be immediately at the [unclear: ew] place. The things one art form [unclear: an]/must do are its inherent qualities; [unclear: onsciou] manipulation of them produces [unclear: ts] most exciting works.

Kozintsev's King Leer, for instance, [unclear: s] a totally cinematic experience. [unclear: The] camerawork, the setting, the acting [unclear: ill] bear no relation to the text as a [unclear: tage] play. They have been designed [unclear: pecifically] for film.

The capture of one art from by [unclear: mother], with no attempt to transform [unclear: he] subject matter, cannot properly [unclear: erve] either. Thus Olivier's Othello, [unclear: hot] with a static camera from just [unclear: outside] the proscenium arch, makes [unclear: ery] boring cinema. It is not a film [unclear: put] a celluloid-strip recording of a [unclear: tage] production.

Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's he Magic Flute is a curious mixture the two extremes. We never forget [unclear: ve] are watching opera: even those [unclear: ew] scenes not shot onstage have an [unclear: operatic] artificial quality. Fidelity to [unclear: he] predominant aesthetic/entertainment purpose indicates the film-maker's subservience to the other art form most clearly of all.

However, certain fundamental attributes of opera have been minimized. Continual use of close-up forbids us that cardinal value in any live performance, the choice of what to look at. Cutting eliminates most of one of the more exciting operatic features, mechan-[unclear: zed] scenery in action. We never see [unclear: he] orchestra. By taking us into the [unclear: wings] Bergman provides amusing commentary on the illusion of the stage. A montage of faces in the audience [unclear: s] a filmic means of underscoring the theme.

For the opera is about the love, [unclear: aeuty] and high pleasures of art possible [unclear: inder] wise and benevolent authoritarian [unclear: ule]. Bergman's film of it is a tribute [unclear: to] beauty in art. The irony of this is [unclear: expressed] by the image of one partic-[unclear: lar] girl in the audience, whom Bergman often returns to as a touchstone for the story's development.

This face boasts an uncanny resem-[unclear: lance] to a Renaissance painting. During a long study near the film's beginning, she wears a frozen, quixotic expression. Except it is not quite frozen: she does her best but twitches get the better of her. Later she registers a smile after a happy moment, serious involvement at times of danger, and so on. Her [unclear: concrived] lack of spontaneity is as perfect [unclear: a] series of paintings as it is a denial of [unclear: per] own humanity.

A dynamic medium has been used to simulate a static one. The shots of the girl help make the film more than just a two-dimensional opera, yet their very beauty symbolises the barrenness to which aesthetics [unclear: can][unclear: tend].

It is always possible to take profound themes and destroy their importance. In my view, performed opera does this; the girl reinforces the process. The beauty in Cries and Whispers surpasses anything in The Magic Flute because it is purely filmic beauty. The qualities of perception and provovation, part of the greatness of A Passion and Scenes from a Marriage, are also lost here.

If you like opera, and don't mind the fact that on a flat screen people tend to merge into the painted backdrops instead of standing out from them as on stage, and if you don't have any quibbles over the forms of cinema, you'll love this film.

The performers, as actors and singers, are excellent; the lip synchronisation is so good as to be all but unnoticeable. The music is superbly played; and there are moments of quite marvellous imagery.

Bergman has wanted to do The Magic Flute since he was twelve. The fulfilment of that wish is carried by the sumpathy and respect of his genius, working as always in splendid harmony with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It is beguiling cinema, beyond doubt a lovely piece of work.

— Simon Wilson.

The Cassandra Crossing

Director: George Cosmatos

Big budgets, big casts, little subtlety, little intelligence. One wonders for how long the American movie companies will continue to exploit the familiar and popular category of film we now call the disaster movie. Not for much longer, I hope, if The Cassandra Crossing is any indication of its development, for this is a true disaster movie, in both senses of the word.

It begins well enough — the opening sequence is an expert display of filming and editing — but gradually resemblances in pattern and form between this and the other movies of its ilk fall into place. One difference here is that the cast is located in neither a ship, a building, a plane, nor for that matter in Los Angleles — but, instead, inside a train.

Two men, in a thwarted attempt to blow up the U.S. sector of the International Health Organisation in Geneva, are pursued by guards into a laboratory containing dangerous quantities of viral pneumonia. Both become infected, one is captured and dies but the other manages to escape out of the country. His means of transport out should not be difficult to guess.

From this point on, as much as the train carries the passengers, the formula carries the film. The formula of disaster movies is well known to us now. There is never one major character but several, each of whom lives, physically or mentally, in a separate theatre of existence until some unexpected catastrophe or other confromts each unlike identity with the other. The characters, by being diverse representations of human nature, evoke dramatic interest from conflict which develops between differing personalities, all of whom are battling for space in the same imbroglio. So that the screen at once becomes populated with good types, bad types, eccentric types etc. So far however, all disaster movies have relied not so much upon the importance of the characters and their interrelationship but upon the actual spectacle or disaster itself and, more significantly, the anticipation of it. The characters become subjective to this and consequently incite the emotions of the audience to pity, fear (a dose of catharsis perhaps), horror, disgust or just poain boredom. This formula, although successful for a while, is now well established and as a result of this familiarity and foreknowledge one is entertained a lot less each time.

Unfortunately for The Cassandra Crossing the weight falls more heavily upon the characters since initially the disaster is present in non-visual terms.

Due to the nature of disaster movies, characters seldom rise above the level of stereotype and so lack any real depth. Witness Richard Harrises Dr. Jonathan Chamberlain make a valiant attempt to contradict this but realising that like the others he must endure the indignities of a poor screenplay. There is a conversation between him and his twice divorced wife, played by Sophia Loren, in which they discuss their relationship in terms of a game, he closes their rapport by saying: "We've played so many games that we dont know what is real anymore". This is standard fare throughout. Ava Gardner looks as though she is doing Earthquake again but actually turns out to be pleasantly mad. Ingrid Thulin, alas, is wasted in a role that offers her next to nothing. Like everyone, she represents a type. One trait of the disaster movie is that the actors are always subordinated into these easily recognisable stereotypes; this enables the audience easier access towards understanding the characters' motives and actions. If one character occupies the screen for only a short time in relation to the total length of the film then the justification for the stereotype method lies in the quick delineation of the character. Actions and movement, while being predictable, are nevertheless characteristic because they are true to the type being played. Burt Lancaster for example, as Colonel MacKenzie, is grim the moment he enters, is grim throughout the film, is grim when the film finishes. He plays a type whose actions cannot be questioned because his actions and dialogue are characteristic of a grim person. And so it goes, for all the actors, for all the film.

The tedium becomes the message. The film plods steps of inevitability. And as usual some die, some survive Nasty men in white suits and gasmasks, an attire suggestive of non-humans, fight it out with the heroes. (An interesting visual trick; since we measure degrees of pain primarily through the observation of a person's facial expression, the concealing by gasmasks of the nasty men's faces acts as a kind of desensitiser for the audience when the white suits and gasmasks are shot and in pain.) The violence here is merely another means of, another excuse for filling in the time until the film's conclusion.

One element of the film did deserve further probing: what of the consequences of the leak of the pneumonic plague, developed secretly by the U.S. for biological warfare? The film askes the question and then ignores it.

In short, this film is nothing but product, an exercise in hack film-making designed solely to cash in on a tried and true routine. One quite capable however, if the proliferation of this type of film increases, of exhausting itself and driving the major studios into bankruptcy in much the same manner the spate of musicals after The Sound of Music did.

— David Beresford

International Film Festival

Penthouse Cinema, Brooklyn.

The festival opening this week at the Penthouse contains an unusual variety of period, nationality and quality. The first three of the following films have been previously gathered together for their shared story of young lovers amidst tragic circumstances.

Los Tarantos (1963) was the first significant Spanish film to break away from the mass-produced Hollywood-style western. Los Tarantos is the name of a dance based on the spasms of the victim of a tarantula spider.' Ancient methods of treating the poison feature in this work by director Rovira-Beleta.

The transformation into black terms of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice makes interesting cinema in Black Orpheus (1959) French director Marcel Camus displays an exciting visual sense with a Carnival at Rio setting, but the film lacks dramatic intensity. Starring Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello. (TV2 screened this film to inaugurate colour transmission, unfortunately receiving a poorly processed print. The festival print will will be in the original colour).

The visual splendours of Iceland are to the fore in a joint Swedish/Danish/Icelandic film. The Red Mantle. The story is pretty classic Romeo and Juliet stuff, based on a medieval Scandinavian legend, and involving jousting, saunas, and most other things Norsemen are famous for. Directed by Gabriel Axel, with Bergman regular Gunner Biornstrand, Oleg Vitov and Gitte Haenning. "Breathtakingly Beautiful" (Judith Crist).

John Huston returned to the States in 1972 after a decade In Europe to make one of his very best films: Fat City. It centres on a boxer in decline, waiting hopelessly for the second chance "Boxing is only the background to this sensitive, beautifully made and knowing film of naturalistic low-life, of people trying to make a living in spite of themselves and their failures in an impoverished society. It is reflective, philosophical, dramatically intense, timely and superb". (International Film Guide). A film to set the crass sentimentality of Rocky in its place Perceptive playing by Stacy Keach and Susan Tyrell in the leads, with Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark. Editing is by veteran Margaret Booth.

Jacques Tati, the maker of Traffic (1971), is considered by many the doyen of European cinematic humour, often being compared to Chaplin. His screen ego, M. Hulot, is a gangling, affectedly English and therefore very French, well-intentioned fellow, who just happens to have the extraordinary ability of turning the simplest mistake into a fully fledged disaster. Tali's canon is small (5 feature films in 23 years), and Traffic is among his best works. It records Hulot's attempts to take the latest in 'Camping-cars' from Paris to the Amsterdam motor show. Preposterous "scapedes combine with an acute sense of visual humour in a very delightful film.

Alfred Hitchcock made Dial M for Murder (1953) in 3-D, but the fad passed so quickly it was released on conventional film. He himself describes it as "a case of drained creative batteries' — certainly the film is hardly one to remember him by. The plot contains some nice twists, there is a good solid scissors-in the back murder, and a pedestrian Scotland Yard officer triumphs over the slick Americans. For Hitchcock fanatics and the fans of leading lady Grace Kelly.

Marcello Mastroianni stars in Down the Ancient Stairs (1975), a French/Italian film about a psychiatrist whose insane asylum forms both an insulator against the use of Mussolini and a fascist state in miniature. His 8 year seclusion in the hospital in search of "the microbe' which causes insanity, has shut him off from scientific ideas in the outside world and destroyed his perspective on human relationships. The arrival of a woman psychiatrist brings him face to face with political reality and his own sanity. Director Mauro Bologini has a firm command of his themes and an assured talent for style. Well worth the visit. Also starring Charlotte Rampling in one of her better performances.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1973) is the second notable film to combine the talents of director Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. For my money it is every bit as good Easy Pieces and probably the best offering in this collection. Like Fat City it is in the well-established tradition of American parables, relating the story of an FM disc jockey engaged in mythologizing his elder brother, for himself and his listeners. This brother is in fact only a small time operator in the local underworld; deflation of the myth precipitates the development of the film. A haunted, subterranean quality is evoked by the deserted beach - n - carnival setting of Atlantic city in winter. Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn are right on form in the other lead roles.

[unclear: —] Simon Wilson.