Michael Snow

THE cool kick of Michael Snow’s Wavelength was in seeing so many new actors—light and space, walls, soaring windows, and an amazing number of color-shadow variations that live and die in the window panes—made into major esthetic components of movie experience. In Snow’s Standard Time, a waist-high camera shuttles back and forth, goes up and down, picking up small, elegantly lighted square effects around a living room very like its owner: ordered but not prissy. A joyous-spiritual little film, it contains both Snow’s singular stoicism and the germinal ideas of his other films, each one like a thesis, proposing a particular relationship between image, time, and space. The traits include rigorous editing, attention to waning light, fleeting human appearances (which suggest a forbidding, animistic statement about life: that the individual is a short-lived, negligible phenomenon and that it is the stability of the inanimate that keeps life from flying away), a rich-dry color so serene as to be almost holy, and a driving beat that is like updated Bach.

Standard Time is an astute, charming exercise compared to the other Snows, which are always steered into purposefully intolerable stretches: tough, gripped snarls of motion which have to be broken through to reach a restful, suave, deltalike conclusion. In his sternest film, titled with a ←→ sign for back-and-forth motion, a specially rigged camera swings right, left, left, right, before a homely, sterile classroom wall, then accelerates into an unbearable blur (the same frenzied scramble, as though the whole creative process was going berserk, that occurs three quarters through “Abbey Road”). In One Second in Montreal, ten stray photographs, culled from the library, all of them of little drab parks connected to public buildings, are turned into a movie that has a special serenity and is pungent with a feeling of city, snow, unexcitement, the mediocrity of public buildings and parks (no fresh air). Despite the dirgelike sonority, I question the length of time that Snow holds on each park to create a majestically slotted ribbon composition.

When the electronic sound in Wavelength reaches an ear-cracking shriek, the one-shot movie, a forty-five-minute zoom aimed at four splendid window rectangles, burns hot white, like the filaments in a light bulb. This middle section is composed of violent changes of color in which the screen shudders from intensities of green, magenta, sienna: a virtuoso series of negative and positive impressions in which complementary colors are drained out so that the room, undergoing spasms, flickers from shrill brilliant green to pure red to a drunken gorgeous red-violet. Despite the grueling passage, which always comes three-quarters through a four-part construction, his two major statement films, Wavelength and ←→, are liftingly intellectual. Besides his Jeffersonian mien, Snow’s films are filled with the same precision, elegance, and on-the-nose alertness that went into Jefferson’s slightest communiqué to a tailor or grocer.

His film career, a progression from austere painterly to a more austere sculptural style has peaked into this queer “double-arrow” film that causes a spectator to experience all the grueling action and gut effort of a basketball game. Just listing the ingredients doesn’t sound like a real night out at the films. This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neck-jerking camera gimmick which hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film which ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam.

In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.

The human intrusions in Wavelength and Standard Time are graceful, poignant, sensitively observed: a fair-sized turtle walks on a line through the camera’s legs straight toward the right-angled corner of a studio bed; at another point, a cat does an arching, almost slow-motion leap onto the bed; then a woman walks briskly by with a towel over her shoulder on her way to the bathroom. There’s no eclecticism to these events, which show a good touch for the tactile quality of 1969 loft existence. Formularized and stiffened, the humanity in the double-arrow movie is a bit dried up. Things are done on cue: a man and woman self-consciously play catch, a cop cases the joint, a mock lecture is given to three students, a gawking and hodgepodge group is seen uncomfortably standing around.

The movies are utterly clear, but they get their special multimedia character from Snow’s using all his talents as painter-sculptor-composer-animator. Obviously a brainy inventor who is already a seminal figure and growing more influential by the day, there is something terribly different about this Canadian in the New York sharp scene. Incapable of a callow, clumsy, schmaltzy move, he’s a real curiosity, but mostly for the forthright, decent brain power that keeps these films on a perfect abstract path, almost always away from preciosity.

January 1970

THE ten best: 1) Black Girl 2) Ma Nuit Chez Maud 3) Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son 4) ←→ 5) Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach 6) Le Gai Savoir 7) a tie among three Hollywood eccentricities, The Wild Bunch, Easy Rider, The Rain People 8) High School and La Raison Avant La Passion 9) Coming Apart 10) They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and La Femme Infidèle.

One. Black Girl could have been sentimental pro-African anti-white (a very quiet, particular, personal story: an obstinate, naive Sengalese, taken to France as a mother’s helper, finds that she has no freedom of movement when she gets there. Thrilled to begin with, anticipating high life and parties, she is made into a full-time maid, baby-watcher, chef, and, quite soon, a bathtub suicide), but instead Sembene’s perfect short story is unlike anything in the film library: translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized by a black man’s grimness in which there is not an ounce of grudge or finger-pointing. The whole movie, echoing flawless acting of an inarticulate who hasn’t broken out of an adolescent self-absorption, holds an even, equilibrated, spiritual tone. Within a spiritualized braille art, Sembene catches perfectly the terrible thing about irreconcilable disjointedness: an illiterate village girl employed by an educated, advantage-seeking French couple; servant-boss; lonely-secure; ritual as against lack of ceremony, the materialistic domesticity of a family circle as opposed to the adventure-seeking of a romantic in a foreign place. With marble cool visuals and one marble cool actress, the spirit of loggerheads is caught in the most minimal conditions. The most charming image: a very long-legged girl teetering around the kitchen on foot-long high heels and a dust rag in her hands.

Two. Ma Nuit Chez Maud is civilized work, beautifully spaced out and observed. Very straight, not pretentious in any way. Rohmer has conceived a potential love affair that doesn’t take, by way of a 24-hour verbal sparring match that is magically phrased by Trintignant and Françoise Fabian. A very atmospheric movie—dry, cold snow, both outside, in the forest-y suburb and inside, in the minds of two people who can’t be totally happy. It’s unusual to center a film inside an encounter of hesitance, either-or moments; his resolve wavers, then he catches himself, the girl goes through a lot of changes from understanding, then sympathy, to miffed and final resignation. Trintignant’s drying out technique for suggesting vulnerability is that of a lean-exquisite miniaturist in a very private, intelligent ground-covering act. Within Fabian’s taunting, flamboyant role is the pathos of a confused intelligence at loose ends. She’s very exciting.

Three. Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son is a shockingly different reconstruction film in which Jacobs, a combined historian-painter-camera nut, too endlessly reshuffles the parts of a rustic 1905 film about two boys and a piglet being chased around one-sided barns and cottages. The major part of an hour-long film is of not-totally abstract shapes in which there is enough of the specific pig-beret-fold to make for the movie’s trademark spiritual richness. Jacobs’ image of the wide black-white crumpled stripes in a boy’s pants or the goose-like neckline and upswept hair of a Chardin maid not only ravishes the eye but moves the spirit, much like a Seurat conté sketch on rough, pebbled paper. All of his pioneer moves—matting out whole areas, blurring, using the closest close-up on an elbow crease—are for going beyond illusionism, illustration, into a spirit world: what should be pure picturesque because of the quaint-corny material is really a turbulent experience of an analytic sensibility. By jamming the spectator right against the substance (a little boy rolls around with a pig in his arms, then rolls into the fireplace and is sucked up the chimney) and looking for the essential-irreducible elements of film, he is in the forbidding Serra-Snow area where the concepts of all his contemporaries are challenged.

Four. ←→, which caused fists to fly and eyes to roll when last shown at MOMA, is a frantically-paced, eccentric, hard-to-take pendulum movie in which Mike Snow’s high-tensile mind is perhaps too poised over the film idea of a charmless classroom projected as sculpted rather than pictured time. The camera, on a special gig that restricts its movements right and left, swings like a guillotine, a hard wooden clap registers on the ear like a butcher’s mallet, as Snow, in his most unsensuous movie so far, concertedly tries for a spiritual realism inside a minimal image. The beauty is in the hardness.

From beginning to end of a resolute three-part musical form of perpetual motion, Snow has mobilized a mirthless, lonely subject, a classroom wall, into an expressive weapon that is made up of all-but-unstomachable ingredients in their purest form: jar, jerk, frenetic motion over space. As the back-forth image speeds up to a hair-raising, psychotic clip, light appears to filter off the sides of a horizontal cube of greenish whiteness. All literary connections in a film image have been junked and a forbidding subject—sculpted in-motion space—has been made the jump-off point of a film design that doesn’t rely on any behavior-sensory patterns of the spectator. The one conventional point in the film, a greenish board choked with chalked information about the film stock, actors, the setting in Fairleigh Dickinson College, comes between the back-forth, up-down section and a hypnotic lyrical coda: this fulcrum-like effect re-emphasizes quite logically the physical conditions of a film that swings right-left, left-right from a fixed spot.

When Snow is at his best, he seems to know first-hand the historical grain of a loft room or renovated artist’s studio. In this hectic, neck-taxing film, he’s very aloof: except for a cop who drives up and cases the unreal activity inside the room, the people are out of place, and there is no curiosity about the fixtures or construction that give this pre-fab room its sterile mechanistic flavor. The asymmetrical design is much harder to take than Wavelength, from the long-short relationship of an unendurable opening and the much shorter mash of repeated shots in the coda to the misery-provoking effect of a camera that is pouring over a space that seems lopsided because the camera is much closer to one wall than to the other.

Five. Straub’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach is full of reflective, icy beauty, which demonstrates that designing a Bach movie and J. S. Bach’s own job-clogged career were equals in hard work. Nothing is made up, no embroidering of the facts (a la Lola Montes). What the film is about—a wife’s life of subservience, discipline, restraint, and a composer engulfed by work, maddened by humiliating jobs, incessantly involved in conning more money out of his patrons—is poured through a minimalist movie apparatus, producing a timeless, classical, boring work in which every shot comes across with super clarity and poignance. There’s no pretense at naturalism and the hollow images of wigged actors who don’t act playing harpsichords and choir singing, suggest a touched-up super-real grisaille, like Ingres’ black-white Grande Odalisque. It looks very staged, the fixed camera angle never pans or zooms, and the basic material—the Bach music used throughout in solid chunks, alternating with silence or the wife’s intense-mellow voice reading passages from her diary—creates the silvery resonance of a Vermeer coming to life, but not too much: no one ever runs, breathes hard, or laughs.

Six. Le Gai Savoir has the same mix, fanatic estheticism, and outrage at the Establishment of an anti-form piece at Leo Castelli’s warehouse. A fresh-faced girl and boy spend the post-midnight hours on a TV stage reviewing the state of world affairs, in a potpourri of advertisements, Tom and Jerry, Magic Marker scribbles and glaring newsreels of street crowds that come on like lantern slides and flicker off quickly. The raucous, exhilarating track hasn’t a soporific note in it. The Berto-Léaud actors are curt, impatient cartoon characters, more extremely cartoons than the Parisian red guardists in La Chinoise. Coutard’s face-slapping photography is robust and throws itself completely into every moment. Every Godard has a new form; this one, with its burning light, gem color, and scarring discordancies, image-sound-titles-handwriting sometimes all at one time, is the meanest and least lulling, a not-too-pure, sprawling attempt to stay politically committed while trying, impossibly, to keep up with the minimal Straub-Warhol-Snow film which is racing out of sight.

Seven. My reservations on The Wild Bunch are almost balanced by the passion for the period (1916 near El Paso). Lucien Ballard’s Winslow Homer-like compositions, and the two warring personalities of Peckinpah’s movie art: a scholarly care with details and a braggart Machismo complex. The trouble is that his writing is sometimes pulp (how did one Tommy Sands muchacho from a little village become a badly-acted explosives ace?), sometimes romantic (a jammed fortress of soldiers and camp followers all gunned down by four bank robbers who become Bunyan-esque heroes at the end), and often keeps the movie 1945 in sentiment. It’s often a lovely movie: a shot of baby-faced soldiers slouched around in a coachcar or the slow motion of bounty hunters, like little logs, going down the river.

The whole movie is out of shape; what is good comes from a tender, nostalgic, patient detailing of the period, always counteracted by the silly, schoolboy Peckinpah philosophy and what it leads to: raucous fellowship is more important than anything, the worst cheat-thief-mercenary is OK as long as he’s true to his mate.

Easy Rider is naive in suggesting that Captain America and Billy could survive one day, not because of redneck Texans or the silent majority, but from being menaced off the road by real Hell’s Angels. The film doesn’t work until these two clichés wake up in jail and meet Jack Nicholson, a Villon in rumpled seersucker. What had been a simplistic, sentimental lament for drugs, dropping out, the road, becomes specific, rhythmic, and abrupt. Comradely scenes between the three are so well set up that when each one is torn out by death the effect is shocking. Hopper, especially, is good, more contemporary than Wild Bunch acting, aware that he’s in a movie, and, through an underhand private technique, keeping the movie alive with weak-ish bluster.

February 1970

DESPITE many good things (the first notable eyes since Per Oscarrson’s in Hunger in Segal’s sodden performance, Eva Marie Saint’s intelligent and tense mimicries emphasizing a hungry, tensed-for-disaster face, the dress shop scene which has a compassionate pessimism but stops before all the material is exploited), Loving at times looks disturbingly like the “two together” cigarette commercials. Actually, the movie is a fifty-fifty movie: it shows a sensitive touch for a man who is a complete mess, whose habits are wrong from the ground up, and, along with a sharply acted wife, creates this pain inside tepidly filmed scenes.

Most hemmed in, domestic, tidy, and not put down hard by parts of the New York press, Loving deals with survival on a middle class level rather than eroticism or affection. Compared with an ingenious scene in Topaz, a silent long shot with a brilliant actor, Roscoe Lee Browne, maneuvering in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, or with the teen-age dance in a mirrored hall in Au Hasard Balthazar in which Bresson creates a powerful psychology having to do with youthful sadism, Loving has a staid, pedestrian image.

Yet the more sensitive critics go strong for this small-gauge movie about a rather talented craftsman who, despite his youth, is a confirmed malcontent taking hidden pleasure in messing up other lives. The reasons for its success must reach beyond its ingratiating gag-a-scene format to the fact that it has a perfect combination for American box office: a well-groomed Hollywood style and a joking pessimism. It shows Connecticut life as a sloppy, painful experience, without an exalted moment to justify or bring some relief to the formlessness of Brooks Wilson’s existence, a shambling modern malaise in which everything—wife, mistress, job, children—runs together into a distasteful routine which he can hardly focus, never mind resolve.

Loving is the foolproof blend: no technical breakouts and an anti-hero whose nihilism is beyond Camus’ Algerian clerk who, unlike Wilson, insists on a measure of dignity in his daily life. George Segal’s Wilson is the third example of Director Irvin Kershner’s invention, a husband of doomed ambition who expends tons of energy promoting himself, a muddle-brained slave who is always in passage around the city looking for stakes, projects, a killing. The crux of the boulder-pushing character is the relationship to success: he’s not exactly hungry for it but on a treadmill that doesn’t yield any—even momentary—satisfactions but gives the moviegoer a vision of an endlessly hurrying wage earner who never hits the same spot twice. Segal’s competent hack, who must be the most mindless, blurred character in film history, is performed almost entirely with an unfocused fatigue around the eyes and a hulking weight in his head and shoulders which lead to endless comedy, lurching toward the camera, stumbling forward in bars, construction sites, and the lavish Connecticut party that abortively ends the movie and solves nothing.

Absolutely, the key to the movie’s interest is the extent of Wilson’s soddenness and Segal’s slurring ability to swim in abasement. Not only is the face a puddle of guilt and woefulness, but the devastating portrait of a weak man depends on Segal’s stalling, on the fact that he can never eliminate, be decisive, or turn down a possibility, be it girl, job or joke. From Brother Rat profiteer to the only employed member in the Bye Bye Braverman band of Jewish writers, Segal’s instinct is to insert himself obliquely so that he’s neither Segal nor role but a supremely devious lurking presence: he has a great pantomiming instinct for the intentional fuck-up. Pre-arranging the psyche of his roles, Segal spends an entire movie on shifting: any wave of energy in his vicinity draws him in its wake. He scores heavily in unpromising exits and entrances, planting a heavy aura of mindlessness and destructive sociability. Comics since Arbuckle and Snub Pollard have been knocking accidentally into waiters and carefully arranged dinner tables: with his sliding, floating technique for soaking in shameful behavior, Segal gives the familiar situation a grotesque realism and the sense that these slapstick moments have real consequence in the hack illustrator’s life.

So most of Wilson’s day is spent in floating, scurrying, innocuous activity; and a good part of the time it’s not far from the truth of New York life. It’s curious how the imaginative texture of this conception is stuck to a stiff, unfulfilled script. There’s no real mystery, excitement, or curiosity in anything concerning the tragic Segal marriage with Eva Marie Saint. Every scene appears to be stretched out and aborted at the same moment—events are arranged out of forgettable dialogue and arty pieces of photography—so that the feeling is of a movie moving toward the beginnings of events.

The opening razzmatazz scene seems endless: all padding and a strangely cast, uncompelling mistress. The camera pans down and across the window of an inexplicably ritzy apartment, finally taking in Segal in a nothing pose, having a morning cigarette while his mistress, all industry, walks out in a huff. The movie’s squareness is indicated before the credits finish: the over-complete decor for a low-salary museum clerk, and all that photographic romance, spotting the pair through fences, traffic signs with varied camera angles to imprint a decidedly chic New York flavor.

Forget the time ambiguity (she’s going to a morning job and he’s rushing to Westport to arrive late at an evening performance of his small daughter’s school play about tin men and fairies), Kershner’s movies, from the sensitive naturalism in The Luck of Ginger Coffey onwards, have been terribly unconscious of the formal and syntactical aspects of filmmaking. This very decent, observant, socially concerned director is pulled along by conventional scripts and when there is an attempt to spike a modest realism with the broad satire used in The Graduate, the director goes for gimmicks and types.

The script could be enumerated scene by scene by listing the gags. A kid from the school operetta—a little prig dressed in a tin suit—upbraids Segal in the boy’s room; the key thing is the self-righteous crack, “You can’t smoke here,” and he picks up the cigarette when Wilson leaves. A grouchy neighbor arrives at eight in the morning with a garbage pail smeared with Wilson’s name, coyly asks “Is this yours?” A tireless female buttonholer interrupts scenes at school, railroad station, and party, to flirt with Wilson. And, finally, a whopper gimmick: an estate with a TV hookup to all its rooms, particularly a child’s playhouse where Wilson’s drunken infidelity is revealed to the whole community. Kershner’s movies, filled with earnestness and situation comedy gags, are kept in a status quo area: his dismal marriage—a job-obsessed husband and a decent wife trying to keep the household going—is hamstrung by the neat middle class instincts of a director who sees all problems of dignity and self-respect in American life as being tied to economic survival, earning a good buck.

The limitations in density and tragedy are always suggested by the way Kershner handles wives, thoroughly domestic creatures who are fearful that their homes are falling apart and, more important, that their fantasy-possessed men are drifting into private worlds. Through no fault of their own, they find themselves in a barren position. The real horror of the film is that while dealing with psychosis it is short-circuited by the cut-rate dialogue, the dabs of impressionistic material that are used as inserts to impress certain labels about a wife (hungry for attention, bitching about petty matters, absorbed with the children). Eva Marie Saint comes across as a telling face rather than as a whole figure understood, developed, brought to fruition by the movie’s material.

The fairly conventional betrayed-suffering wife is a Kershner staple and a limited view of a woman (strictly a husband’s slant), but something remarkable always happens in these movies: an intelligent actress turns a cliché role into high art, playing it for limitless bitterness. Saint is too well-groomed to top Mary Ure’s Mrs. Coffey, but there are scenes which have a morbid honesty, the first occasions on which she has tangled with lack of self-esteem. This is the first role in which she exploits timid awkwardness and the facial qualities of maturity. In fine scenes, like the one in a dress shop where she’s trying on party dresses for a couldn’t-care-less husband, the actress’s terribly moving candor is both better and deeper than anything written or directed.

Zabriskie Point. Slugged by critics, this continuous photographic lyricism shouldn’t have been treated as a realistic portrait of America. Among the things excoriated were a non-actress (Daria Halprin) with great legs, tan, and sleeveless suede-colored dress, a dustbowl section with a perfectly chosen location and imaginatively used kids, and a handsome lyrical view of America right through the fantastically photographed shots of 1970 culture floating and shooting into the air.

Topaz. Pretty good entertainment with a number of standout scenes involving either Roscoe Lee Browne or Michel (always good) Piccoli. It is an unusual, logical Hitchcock spy film in that it deals with so many faces, nationalities, global locations, and portrays the American-French espionage geniuses as devitalized, all the others as witty and passionate. There are a lot of details—a woman’s death glimpsed in a slow spiral—that belong in a defunct movie drawer called “Hitchcock touches,” but the movie stays alive.

The Damned. A fascinating film, complexly conceived and composed in chiaroscuro color, melodramatic space, extravagant held-on poses. In a movie that has the compelling power of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, all the good sections seem to be dominated by Helmut Berger’s silent-film acting and plastered down hair. Visconti’s remembrance of the Third Reich has ridiculous images: a trumped up marriage scene and a mother-son bed scene, but it also has a great birthday party with an unexplained scream and a very intense broad image study of a daringly acted depraved hysteric in a small furnished room. A rotten musical score by Maurice Jarre.

Au Hasard Balthazar. A rich catalog of mythology and symbolism about donkeys squeezed into a queer script that wanders and doubles back, detailing the varieties of evil and self-destruction that Bresson seems to be saying is Human Nature. Anne Wiazemsky is exquisitely and movingly beautiful, both willfully perverse and strong in character (a standout scene: eating spoonfuls of honey while practically trading her body for a night under a miser’s roof). I think this is a superb movie for its original content, exhilarating editing and Bresson’s Puritanistic camera work, belt-high and wonderfully toned, that creates a deep, damp, weathered quality of centuries—old provincialism.

May 1970

ONE of the strongest images in Ozu’s The End of Summer (1961) is the crematorium smokestack at the top of a bland, inexpressive landscape, symbolizing the end of an old rake, who sneaked a day at the bicycle races with his mistress and died of overexposure. The sinewy sturdy old man (Ganjiro Nakamura, who looks like Picasso himself with his cockiness and golden sturdy vigor) is the only rambunctious member of a very restrained, duty-conscious family—the invariable cornerstone around which Ozu constructs his pared down home drama perfections. The tactics of the long lead-in to the crematorium shot (besides the smokestack aimed at heaven, some equally sobering, numb landscapes shot nearly from sand level of two peasants washing clothes in the river, and three crows pacing very nervously, waiting for the old man’s cremation, plus a few moments with the querulous, self-concerned family, impatiently put out) smacks a little of an over-obvious crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s.

Ozu’s rigidly formalized, quaint hominess, a blend of Calvin Coolidge, Blondie, and Mies’s neo-plastic esthetic, is like coming into a beautifully ordered home and being surrounded by respectful manners. It doesn’t quite reach the pedestal of being “utterly Japanese,” or “an unusually profound presentation of character.” Simply poised linearism is probably closer to the truth. The simple-minded Jane Austen script (who’s going to marry whom) shows a Fifties image of Japanese life in which there is often a bland proper face with a spectacular keyboard of gleaming white teeth. “Profound characterization” seems to be a minor concern of the director compared to that of creating a delicately poised domestic panorama and in the process making workable some of the oldest tools in movie construction. Two people standing, sitting, kneeling, always amazingly decorous, deciding whether the family’s brewery will have to merge with “big capital,” their conversation spaced out in one-shots of each speaker. Ozu is much more formalized than this 1930s early talkies technique suggests. Where Hawks is matter-of-fact and eye level at the two speakers, Ozu hieratically shuttles one-two-shots, the camera always on speaker, never on listener, and autocratically dismisses anything (no dolly, fades, punctuation) that smacks of movement or congestion. Ozu uses big still-life shots—the barrels outside a brewery—as chapter divisions between the little heartaches of the Kawamild family: should Number One sister marry the owner of a small steel mill? Must father embarrass his three grown daughters by renewing an early infidelity with an innkeeper?

The whole story moves towards the serene, ironic death of a lecherous father, unlike any other movie, in a kind of Morse code line. You see a little segment of family drama, then silence, followed by three shots of the brewery’s wide tubs lined against a wall just outside the omnipresent doorway, which is Ozu’s most consistent compositional device, and then another piece of middle-class soap opera. This scene-silence-bridging routine (sometimes wildly emotional music is played against the chapter division landscapes) repeats until the last of the three shots of black crows on a very blue-serene shore ends the graceful dot-dash parade and leaves the Ozu message: all is transitory, but the family remains.

Ozu’s shorthand syntax most resembles Bresson’s in his attention to the beauty of restricted movement, ritual-like repetitions, a human emphasis that is either agonized (Bresson) or sunnily benign (Ozu). This film, the September song for a cheerful old rascal, makes any Bresson seem the darkest dungeon of morbidity and sexual obsession. Lighting, theme, acting: you’d never find a row of white teeth fronting Bresson’s graffiti-like shadowy imagery.

Ozu seems dedicated to that three inch doll whose head bobs up and down in the rear window of a philistine’s automobile, but there’s something likable, possibly profound, about these decorous, doll-like people. A hypnotic goodness pours out of restricted actors in coupled compositions.

Ozu’s long career, which started in Snub Pollard-type silent comedies, never outgrows the Hal Roach idea of a movie image being naive and making you feel good. From start to finish, it’s benevolence day with a family of short people who are short of every possible neurosis except an infinite capacity to sit still and grin happily at each other. Funny compositions: the two speakers are parallel rather than facing each other and they’re boxed in by a vertical-horizontal order that is more emphatic than the tranquil pair. A person gets a little bored watching this family worry over its future, but, despite all the linear ploys, the use of up-down views in which there is a sense of a person looking straight ahead from a repose position on a mat, the movie stays light, airy and fresh because of its rigorous abstract style. As it travels across a nearly empty landscape of precisely poised static compositions, the film leaves no doubt of being in the hands of a masterful housekeeper who has both sympathy for his family and a deep belief in his Morse code style of moviemaking.

“You haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. What you want is pornography, looking at yourself in mirrors.” This frothing philosophizing causes Eleanor Bron, a fiercely self-conscious actress of smirks and mincing, to come down on Alan Bates’s passionately yammering head with a lapis lazuli paperweight. This blow to kill an elephant produces the funniest response to sadism. “Oh no you don’t Hermione, I don’t let you,” and, instead of rushing for a doctor, Bates runs straight through all kinds of Nature, thickets-turfs-clumps, pulling off his clothes, ending up in a grass-squirming act where he tries to cleanse himself of Hermione’s hothouse corruption and culture mongering. Like Isadora and Charge of the Light Brigade, Women In Love is a lush decorator’s job split between spurts of steaming, whipped-up acting and longer amorphous stuff where a whole production crew immerses itself in scene setting: a yearly picnic for mine workers jammed with choreographies, cows moving like Rockettes, and the double drowning of two young lovers—a treat for necrophiliacs (their naked bodies are discovered entwined in the mud after the lake is drained).

This sprawling period reconstruction is not as florid a production as The Damned, but it’s in there, and much more of a multi-auteur product. The script (Larry Kramer) is carefully collaged D. H. Lawrence, the direction (Ken Russell) is an extravagant rouge job, each scene an operetta with its own private mahogany-to-hayseed yellow color, and the movie is further pushed out of whack by four actors who loom and bulk like Maillol sculptures, but have the quirky idiosyncratic faces of a Lautrec. All these people pushing the film in personal ways are really dominated by Lawrence and his apocalyptic vision. So the movie ends up like a gaudy chariot pulled by twelve furious stallions who have been nibbling on locoweed.

Lawrence wrote about restless people, of quick irritations and tenacious wills, more involved with the idea of love than the act. The exact scenes of his self-nominated “best novel” have been cheapened because they now echo a hundred films. Glenda Jackson in Nighttown has been rendered by conventional romanticists, Carol Reed style, with the same hulks of necking couples in chiaroscuro alleyways; two Joe Sawyer types washing themselves in their backyard watch Jackson’s hard-eyed glitter pass them by, and they hit her with the same over-centered, bragging crack that might appear in Ford’s Informer sculpture or even Richard Lester: “I’d give a week’s wages for five minutes of that.” Oliver Reed, the only character with enough script time to make his brute-strength-under-a-stiff-collar character halfway understandable, is in one formalized action film cliché after another, spurring blood from his horse’s flanks in a race to the crossing with a freight train. Kramer’s script cuts out all the quiet spots, particularly the inner thoughts and Lawrence’s favorite image, the always-changing emotions of conversation.

June 1970