Stratford Film Festiva
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Stratford Film Festiva 1 i*iflWiTS"iv^ "-^ * -' t,. I '-' f ' ,^ -» - •<•••• --.y.^.. "^•...ji*^^ 38 Cinema Canada Point of View worthwile examination of the powers and currents that in In 1972 about 20 people took memberships for the full week actuality form nations and create "heroes." A child's history, of events at the Stratford Film Festival. Last year, almost 10 romantic and ridiculous - a boy child's. Loads of blood and times that many did. Popularity of the Festival is on the rise guts, slaughtering and connivery and cruelty, plus a beheading again, and with justification, for it is a unique and charming so awkward and desperate for effect that it caused comic festival and a pleasure to visit. relief, were the chief features of this mud-and-blood spattered It offers no brass, no hype, no high-powered shenanigans war-adoring show. Any treatment that could show the such as surfeit other bigger noisier efforts, just a quiet week wealthy and powerful sister in the largest banking house of the (10 days in 1974!) of interesting films culled from world time as an adorable, beautiful, faithful innocent who looks like festivals, shown in a comfortable theatre in a conservative, she just won the Miss Teen Pageant, certainly isn't taking full mannerly little Ontario town. advantage of the opportunity to investigate the power of The Festival actually began in 1956, and, run by the Michael's personality in creating converts to his point of view. Stratford Festival Office, lasted six seasons, to 1961. Re Sergiu Nicolaescu's reputation was originally based on vitalized, it began again in 1971 with a "7th" season, under flower/art shorts, for which he's won a number of prizes. I the energetic direction of Gerald Pratley and Clive Denton of finally saw one, the Dream of Roses, and found his time-lapse the Ontario Film Theatre, abetted by Pat Thompson as P.R. photography of flowers opening and petals falling to a lush and in cooperation with the Stratford Festival Office. It seems musical score as exquisite as paintings on velvet, and similarly now to be settling in for permanence, and eventually, stature. in that same gasp-of-admiration class that still wins festival These first years of what I expect will become a terribly prizes. Considering the determination and organization and well established and possibly renowned festival, are the inter skill necessary to make a film like Michael the Brave, it is some esting and exciting ones. Now Pratley and Denton court consolation to me that a powerful romanticist like Nicolaescu producers and distributors of the films they select, no doubt is just directing pretend armies. murmuring of the great North American market to the Male battlefields apparently aren't confined to history and European and Third World filmmakers, reminding Americans territorial warfare; men also think of themselves as conquering of the large audience in nearby Toronto, the safest big city in heroes among the less noticeably bloody hearts and thighs of the east (so far) and hinting of prestige and the popular press women, subduing foreign territory with a short sword and coverage that will come in time. much skill. Thus the Hungarian entry, Szindbad, presented a True too, Jamaica's The Harder They Come was shown at handsome devil in the Mastroianni mold as he, silver sideburns the Festival in 1972 and well received. It took a long time and distinguished face, leafs back through the pages of his coming to Toronto, but predictably drew enthusiastic audi personal history, fondling the memories of his many loves and ences of West Indians and indigenous Torontonians just as the occasionally retreating to a red and womb-like brothel and his critics said it would. The reaction to films at the Stratford large, comfortable, rather ugly mistress, wife and mother Film Festival in many ways has proven a good indicator of surrogate. their eventual commercial reception in this part of North The male, played by Zoltan Latinovits, is seen with a tinge America. of regret; he is really no hero, and director Huszarik in fact One result of this is that I feel it necessary to be very studies him with a tender sympathetic sigh. If I interpret the conscientious in writing my personal opinions of these films as film correctly it tells me that women are beautiful and a festival reviewer. Remember though, seeing films at a marvellous and that men need them and that without love- Festival is after all much like meeting someone at a party. Just making life is not worthwhile, but if you devote your life to as your impressions are influenced by the party itself, the no greater pursuit than sensual satisfaction, you will in the end guests, the gaiety or deadUness, your view of the film is have, and be, nothing. affected by the other films in the festival surrounding it, the Sandor Sara's photography was magnificent. Truly. A cas general ambiance and the audience reactions. And just as that cade of beauty. The romantic theme was embellished with handsome athletic type who stood out so in a crowded room visuals of the finest linens and lace, glass and silver, women full of boozy pseudo-intellectuals turned out to be as interest and girls. Costumes, coiffures and localities all vied to cause ing as an empty pea-pod over lunch a week later, you can exclamations of delight. Each scene seemed to surpass the last misjudge a film somewhat by the company it keeps. as Szindbad journeyed through his sensual life. Yet through all Finally, it's pretty redundant to point out that a reviewer's this orgy of beauty I became withdrawn, reluctant, resentful at viewpoint is just the opinion of one person. As Herbert seeing women as just one more form of sensual pleasure and Whittaker, Globe and Mail theatre critic, recently remarked, nothing else. And during the exquisite gourmet meal which "Would anyone really prefer the opinion of a committee?" nearly kills Szindbad and which makes a sensitive woman shudder as the connection between women as objects and finally women as delicious food is made all too clear, I found Eastern Europe Shows Off myself thinking of Atwood's Edible Woman. The Czechoslovakian entry was Valerie and Her Week of Eastern European films selected for the 1973 festival, with one Wonders, 1970, directed by Jaromil Jires and photographed by exception, had a great deal in common. They were big budget, Jan Curik. Again, like Szindbad, it was notable for virtuoso lavish, and overwhelming works, heavy on artistry, the skills of camera work and suffering splendor. Such closeups, such set design, costuming and imaginative decoration, and superbly framing, such light, such colors . one runs out of superla photographed. And they were very old fashioned in film tives (like such?). And actress Jaroslava Musil as Valerie is as terms, using little that was innovative in either technique or beautiful and delicate as a fairytale princess. theme. Shades of Juliet of the Spirits here we have again a male The one I liked the least was Michael the Brave from visualization of the daydreams and nightdreams of a female, Romania. Whole armies were enlisted for this historical opus, only this time of a thirteen year old who has just dropped two also called The Last Crusade. "200 actors, 50 leading parts, 7 beautiful ruby globules of first menstral blood on a daisy as battles (30,000 extras in one), 150 period cannons, 200 she passes, and who now enters a magical mystical surreal stuntmen on horseback . 38,000 spears," boasts their press pubic dream-world. The fantastical and melodramatic fancies folder. This simplistic rendering of the unifying of Wallachia, of the maiden's dreams meld in and out of her equally Transylvania and Moldavia into modern Romania, in style fantastic mind as strange sequences combining martyrdom and more DeMille than Griffiths, may be a necessary force in that incredible rescues, love of brother, grandmother, strange in country to develop or encourage national consciousness, but it cestuous feelings for male parent or grandparent, vampire was, like so many epics, too much a pageant and too little a imagery linked to the blood, innumerable beautiful virgins, latinovits as Szinfibadwi(/r one^ Cinema Canada 39 Frederik Becklen in Kjell Grede 's Hugo and Josef in girls' love, and everything imaginable except normality, over pattern of films of violence, cruelty, battles, mutilations and whelm the film. Surreality and dream sequences don't have to tortures and a strictly male point of view. It is far more than make sense, and there isn't much here to suggest the inner that, though it contains it all. fancies of a pubescent girl, or what it's really like to be a Handled in a classically constructed style, divided into young female in Czechoslovakia. For that you need to see formal parts like the screens upon which icons are sometimes Vera Chytilova's Daisies, where she makes the definitive painted, it reveals a vast panorama of 15th century Russia, a comment on women as edible goodies by having her young seething cauldron of a nation bubbling into being, a muddy females tramp all over a gorgeous banquet, quite spoiling all miserable universe of people barely above the animal stages. the beautiful food. Needless to say, Valerie is beautiful, and The remoteness of art, as typified by the icons of the great surrounded by fruit and lace, she does look good enough to monk Theophanes and Rubliev's early work, and the violence, eat. With the kind of imagination she's endowed with in the lusts and needs of the people of Russia, are inexorably brought fihn, imagine the nightmares she'll have when she realizes that.