The Presence of Jean Renoir ERNEST CALLENBACH and ROBERTA SCHULDENFREI 8
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PER COPY $1.00 Q UART E RLY $4.00 PER YEAR FILM VOL. XIV, NO. 2-WINTER 1960 PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK 2 CALIFORNIA PRESS ARTICLES The Presence of Jean Renoir ERNEST CALLENBACH AND ROBERTA SCHULDENFREI 8 Editorial and Classics Revisited: La Grande Illusion JAMES KERANS 10 sales office: Berkeley 4, An Interview with Sidney Lumet PETER BOGDANOVICH 18 California THE FESTIVAL SCENE- Berlin, Karlovy-Vary, Venice CYNTHIA GRENIER 24 London DAVIDSTEWART HULL 30 EDITOR THE ART FILM AND ITS AUDIENCES: I- Allies, Not Enemies PHILIP CHAMBERLIN Ernest Callenbach 36 FILM 40 ASSISTANT EDITOR REVIEWS Albert Johnson Dejeuner sur l'Herbe: GIDEON BACHMANN The Entertainer:ARLENE CROCE Los ANGELESEDITOR The Savage Innocents: DOUGLASCOX See You Tomorrow: NORMANC. MOSER Colin Young The Flute and the Arrow: ROGER SANDALL Macario: R. H. TURNER NEW YORK EDITORS The Ballad of a Soldier and A Stranger Knocks: ALBERTJOHNSON William Bernhardt Black Pearls and Be Good All Your Life: KENNETH J. LETNER and Cecile Starr Ein Mann geht durch die Wand: HARRIET R. POLT ROME EDITOR Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness: JOSEPHKOSTOLEFSKY MarvinGluck Era Notte a Roma: LETIZIA CIOTTI MILLER PARIS EDITOR Mein Kampf: CHRISTOPHER BISHOP Cynthia Grenier BOOK REVIEWS 56 Theory of Film and The Three Faces of the Film: ERNEST CALLENBACH ADVISORY Kino: DAVIDSTEWART HULL EDITORIALBOARD Andries Deinum ENTERTAINMENTS 61 August Frug6 Hugh Gray PRODUCTION REPORT 62 Paul Jorgensen Gavin Lambert THE COVER: Nadia Gray in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Copyright 1960 by The Regents of the University of California. Views expressed in signed articles are those of the authors. Indexed in the International Index to Periodicals. Published quarterly. Second- class postage paid at Berkeley, California, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. 2 Editor's Notebook dium, in this sense, we should indeed dismiss as an irresponsiblecritic. And there are few critics who would, as a matter of fact, pass up The Critical Question: the chance to say whether they think the tenor Another View or tendency of a film is "good"or "bad,"accord- ing to their lights. In the Autumn issue of Sight & Sound editor So this is not really the question. Penelope Houston has done film and film criti- Miss Houston'sarticle is also good in its firm cism a signal service by bringing into the full sense of being situated in a particularhistorical view of her large and international audience tradition. Her generation, as she says, is that some questions about film thought which have which created Sequence at Oxford and later not received much public attention, and to turned Sight & Sound from the all too official which hardly any new answershave lately been organ of the BritishFilm Instituteinto the finest forthcoming. Where, in short, is film criticism journalof film criticism in the world (which it going? Anothermajor article in the same issue still is, in our opinion). But that generation, of Sight & Sound is a discussion of what is so "whoseattitudes toward the cinema were being far the only serious Western alternativeto the formulatedat the time of the neo-realistexperi- dominant school of film writing: the work of ment,"now finds itself under attack by younger the Cahiers du Cinema "gang." As Richard people in England, and a certain dissatisfaction Roud convincingly shows, this is no real alter- with Sight & Sound may be encounteredin the native. To turn from what now may seem the United States as well. In this issue Miss Hous- stodgy or literary approach of Sight & Sound ton takes up the cudgels, which is, surely, all to or other "official"journals to the wildly inac- the good; there is, sadly, little traditionof seri- curate and sometimes crypto-fascist approach ous debate in film criticism. of Cahiers would be change but certainly not -Not that the attacks she is answering are progress. entirely serious. (It is weird to hear the unmis- Perhaps, however, we can hope for more- takably querulous "beat" note emerging from for the growth of what we might without em- the new journal she quotes, Oxford Opinion.) barrassmentcall a new film criticism. The sturdy ship of S&S, afloat on a sea of liter- Miss Houston's long article seems to us ex- ary and intellectualtradition that has been run- cellent in many respects. Above all (for this is ning for some centuriesnow, is not likely to be a point on which grave misunderstandingsmight blasted out of the water by such sniping. But it arise) we must admire the concern for human is worth considering the alternatives proposed beings, for human life, which underlies her de- there, and in Cahiers,and in some circles in this sire to have critics deal primarilywith what she country: the cult of the worthless story, the terms the "motive force" of films. The phrase jazzed-up gangster film, and sometimes Leni may be a bad one: the motive forces of artists Riefenstahl. It is tempting to dub this juvenile- are often inscrutable,and what appears in one delinquent film criticism,and the phrase is not decade to be-the driving force of a film later entirely inaccurate: the critical stance arises may pale into irrelevance. Nonetheless: film is from the same impulse-to destroy the smug a social art, one we take to be of direct personal and hypocritical cant of the "square"-adults, importanceto large masses of men. It exists as to adopt as idols things the elders despise. One an industry in an elaborate social context; its person'ssophisticate is another'ssquare; so odd creators are men living and acting, culturally sympathiesmay spring up in this kind of game. and politically, in a world whose reality is so It is an interesting attitude; but we doubt insistent no one need insist upon it. Any critic whether it is criticism. who attempted to write about films without a Miss Houston's article is also admirable in consciousness of the seriousness of the me- pointing out that "Film criticism is in search 3 of an aesthetic, which will not be found in the of commentand discussion." But this, surely, is narrowerissues of committed versus anti-com- the province of politics, broadly conceived, or mitted attitudes . the unattractivetruth, of of a special kind of sociology highly developed course, is that there is plenty of reviewing and in this country, with its elaborate techniques not nearly enough criticism (and a magazine of content analysis and so on. The main con- such as this one must accept its share of the cern of critics cannot be with the rhetoric of guilt); that the film, because it cannot be taken films, in this sense-or with their "ends"-any home and studied like a novel or a play, invites more than it can be with their grammaralone- reactionsand impressionsrather than sustained with their "means." analysis; that there has never really been an Films do advocate and promote and oppose. aesthetics of the sound cinema, and that most But a film, if it is a film and not merely a com- of the standard textbooks are useful only for mercial product, cannot be dealt with as if it those who still believe that cinema history vir- were an animated tract. A good film is good tually stops with Blackmail and The Blue precisely because it is an indissoluble whole, Angel." This is both a gracious and an ac- a tightly knit, incredibly complex, artistically curate statement. And it is valuable as a re- unified organism. minder that, in searching for a new criticism, Perhaps,therefore, what is needed to enable we are not trying to invent some miraculous us to push through the present impasse is a machine, into which one puts films and out of kind of "textual" criticism: criticism which which spews criticism. (There are people who sticks much closer to the actual work itself would welcome such a contraption.) "In the than is usual. (There is hardly a published long run," Miss Houston writes, "the critic is critic alive who could not do a chilling parody still on his own, confronted with the work of of the usual film review.) For the ordinary art. His tools: his sensibility, his knowledge, treatment given films in Sight & Sound, this his judgment, and his apparatus of values." journal, and most other film publications,does This is very true, but not simple. For any not get down in enough detail to what we need critic also operates, consciously and uncon- to know about how, exactly, the new films are sciously, in a tradition. Some of this tradition being made, and where they are going. Such he perceives as "knowledge,"some as "values"; questionsare grubbyand difficult;they demand the most dangerous,in the long run, is the part that critics know what they mean by art in he perceives as "sensibility" or "judgment." screen terms. What many film writers seem to be feeling at Such analysis would, of course, make short this juncture is that the traditional constella- work of the "masterworks"of the Cahiers tion of these factors has become unsatisfactory. school. Moreover, even je-m'en-foutismecan It must be made perfectly clear that no one be subjected to scrutiny, if one is really inter- yet knows precisely why. But we do know that ested in the films and not in the pose of the some of the obvious "ways out" are insufficient. critic. (The Cahiers pose is the most dramatic One might, for example, take the "technical" yet devised, no one will deny; and it should not way out-arguing, as do some of the madder be dismissedlightly-where are the young Eng- young French critics, that it is fine trouvailles lish or Americancritics who are likely to make that make a film.