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Hollywood: the Shock of Freedom in Films -- Printout -- TIME Back to Article Click to Print Friday, Dec. 08, 1967 Hollywood: The Shock of Freedom in Films (See Cover) Two girls embrace, then enjoy a long, lingering kiss that ends only ' when a male intruder appears. A vulpine criminal in a sumptuous penthouse pulls aside a window curtain to look down at the street. When he releases the curtain, he is abruptly in another apartment. He crosses the thickly carpeted living room to peer into a bedroom; when he turns back, the living room is empty and bare- floored. In the midst of an uproariously funny bank robbery, a country-boy hoodlum fires his pistol; the tone of the scene shifts in a split second from humor to horror as the bloodied victim dies. At first viewing, these scenes would appear to be photomontages from an underground-film festival. But The Fox, based on a D. H. Lawrence story with a lesbian theme, is soon to be released nationally, starring Sandy Dennis. Point Blank, with Lee Marvin, is in its plot an old-fashioned shoot-em-down but in its technique a catalogue of the latest razzle-dazzle cinematography. Bonnie and Clyde is not only the sleeper of the decade but also, to a growing consensus of audiences and critics, the best movie of the year. Differing widely in subject and style, the films have several things in common. They are not what U.S. movies used to be like. They enjoy a heady new freedom from formula, convention and censorship. And they are all from Hollywood. Poetry & Rhythm. Hollywood was once described as the only asylum run by its inmates. It was the town where, as George Jean Nathan said, "ten million dollars' worth of machinery functions elaborately to put skin on baloney." There is still plenty of machinery out there putting skin on baloney. But the most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls" the furious springtime of world cin ema," and is producing a new kind of movie. Newness is not merely a matter of time but of attitude. Despite the legacy of such rare masters as D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, the vast majority of films a decade ago were little more than pale reflections of the the ater or the novel. The New Cinema has developed a poetry and rhythm all its own. Traditionally, says Cahiers Editor Jean-Louis Comolli, "a film was a form of amusement — a distraction. It told a story. Today, fewer and fewer films aim to distract. They have be come not a means of escape but a means of approaching a problem. The cinema is no longer enslaved to a plot. The story becomes simply a pretext." Whether or not film makers want to tell a story, they no longer need adhere to the convention that a movie should have a beginning, middle and end. Chronological sequence is not so much a necessity as a luxury. The slow, logical flashback has given way to the abrupt shift in scene. Time can be jumbled on the screen—its foreground and background as mixed as they are in the human mind. Plot can diminish in a forest of effects and accidents; motivations can be done away with, loose ends ignored, as the audience, in effect, is invited to become the scenarist's collaborator, filling in the gaps he left out. The purposeful camera can speed up action or slow it down; the sound track can muddle a conversation or over-amplify it to incoherence. Black-and-white sequences intermingle with color. Comedy and tragedy are no longer separate masks; they have become interchangeable, just as heroes and villains are frequently indistinguishable. Movies still make moral points, but the points are rarely driven home in the heavy-hammered old way. And like some of the most provocative literature, the film now is apt to be amoral, casting a coolly neutral eye on life and death and on humanity's most perverse moods and modes. Proust Is Possible. The New Cinema has been displayed on U.S. screens recently with astonishing variety and virtuosity. Michelangelo Antonioni parodied the modish artsiness of fashion photography to help create the swinging London mood of Blow-Up. Italy's Gillo Pontecorvo faithfully reproduced the grainy style of newsreel footage to restage The Battle of Algiers—a pictorially harrowing exposition of war as an extension of politics. Czech Director Jiff Menzel leaped from tears to laughter in quick sequence to create the moody turmoil of Closely Watched Trains. The "undoable" film can now be done, as shown by the creditable and convincing movie versions of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Even Proust is possible—if anyone wants to try. It remains to be seen whether the new thematic and technical freedom is a cause for unrestrained rejoicing; there is the obvious danger that it will be used excessively for the sake of gimmickry or shock. But the fact is that innovation is no longer the private preserve of the art houses but a characteristic of the main-line American movie. Two for the Road, otherwise an ordinary Audrey Hepburn vehicle, has as much back-and-forth juggling of chronology as any film made by Alain Resnais—not to mention a comic acidity about marital discord that is as candid as anything the Swedes have said. Even a conspicuous failure such as John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye bleeds color images through black-and-white in a startling extension of the camera's palette. U.S. movies are now treating once-shocking themes with a maturity and candor unthinkable even five years ago: the life of drug addicts in Chappaqua, homosexuality in Reflections, racial hatred in In the Heat of the Night. And The Graduate, a new Mike Nichols film, is an alternately comic and graphic closeup of a 19-year-old boy whose sexual fantasies come terrifyingly true. No More Habit. As in the days of Goldwyn and Mayer, the studio goal is to make money—but the customers are now willing to pay for a different product. "The main change has been in audience," argues Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount. "Today, people go to see a movie; they no longer go to the movies. We can't depend on habit any more. We have to make 'I've got to see that pictures." As the studio heads have discovered, there is not a single cinema audience today but several. There is —and perhaps always will be—an audience for banality and bathos. But a segment of the public wants the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde. By now, television has all but taken over Hollywood's former function of providing placebo entertainment. Movie attendance among the middle-aged is down; yet box-office receipts are up— partly because cinema has become the favorite art form of the young. Paving the Way. The growing mass audience has been prepared for change and experiment both by life and art. It has seen—and accepted—the questioning of moral traditions, the demythologizing of ideals, the pulverizing of esthetic principles in abstract painting, atonal music and the experimental novel. Beyond that, oddly enough, younger moviemen credit television with a major role in paving the way for acceptance of the new in films. "TV has changed the world by changing people's attitudes," says Polish Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water). "When they are born with a TV set in their room—well—you can't fool them any more." Or at least, it might be added, not in the same way. Director Richard Lester, who got his start on TV, believes that television's abrupt leap from news about Viet Nam to Corner Pyle to toothpaste ads expands people's vision. "TV is best at those sudden shifts of reality. TV, not Last Year at Marienbad, made the audience notice them for the first time." Undeniably, part of the scandal and success of Bonnie and Clyde stems from its creative use of what has always been a good box-office draw: violence. But what matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is the new freedom of its style, expressed not so much by camera trickery as by its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole—the creation of unity from in congruity. Blending humor and horror, it draws the audience in sympathy toward its antiheroes. It is, at the same time, a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American '60s and an esthetic evocation of the past. Yet it observes the '30s not as lived but as remembered, the perspective rippled by the years to show that there are mirages of time as well as space. The nostalgic Technicolor romanticism alters reality, distorting it as a straight stick under water appears to be bent. Ghoulish Curio. The story has its basis in fact. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two veal-faced wrongos who rode out of Texas during the Depression, killing and plundering for fun and profit. The constabulary bushwacked them in May 1934 near Arcadia, La., firing a thousand rounds into the fugitives and their 1934 Ford De Luxe, which 18 years later was still touring auto showrooms as a ghoulish curio. On their own turf, Bonnie and Clyde passed from the front page into folklore; elsewhere, they were relegated to Sunday-supplement features, colorful figures of the gangland era. It is a measure of the movie's excellence that it has transformed those unlikely, unlikable criminals into the leading characters of an epic folk opera.
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