ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL
meaning and effective, but annoyingly romantic message film about adolescent sexuality, and in particular about the forces which lead to sexual ignorance among young people. Boba and Maria are a star-struck young couple who ‘accidentally’ conceive a child. For a host of reasons, which are well brought out and which centre on the appalling conservatism of schools and parents, they don’t do anything about it until it is nearly too late. Then, thanks to the m isguided generosity of friends, and despite the availability of legalized abortion in Yugo slavia, Maria has an illegal abortion which leaves her in hospital, lucky to be alive and unable to bear children. Ail the events and characters ring true, and there is no hint of condemnation of sexual activity among children. It is a shame, however, and more than a little dishonest, that the film so senti m entally celebrates the innocent romance of youth. After all, innocence and ignorance go hand in hand. Of the eight films from France which were programmed, only four were shown. Michel Andrieus’ Basfiene, bastienne accidentally wound up in Indonesia, Michael Mitrani's A Balcony in the Forest was misplaced by the French embassy, the controversial documentary Prisoners of Mao by Vera Belmont was not sent, and Joseph Losey’s Routes to the South Was withdrawn. European critics obviously consider Jacques Doillon a director to watch. In La drolesse, which was the official French entry at Cannes this year, he handles an extremely taboo subject — the abduction of an 11 year-old girl by a retarded youth. Doillon sticks to his characters like flypaper, and while he’s a fine director of actors in claustrophobic situations, the film is unpleasant and unbelievable. The documentary feature Simone de Beauvoir, by Malka Ribowski and Josee Dayan was also a great disappointment. I suspect that the favorable response to the film from many viewers can be measured, in part, by their admiration for De Beauvoir and knowledge of her work (and that of Jean-Paul Sartre who ap pears at length). For most, however, the film is like a claustrophobic game of ping-pong between novice players. The filmmakers apparently allowed De Beauvoir to choose friends and as sociates with whom she could talk on screen, let them loose unprepared or rehearsed in front of the camera, which held a relentless static television closeup, and then interspersed this with archival material of everyone but De Beauvoir. With more purist discipline than sense, they have also included an opening se quence in which De Beauvoir asks ques tions of her friend and associate Claude Lanzuraun, who is so nervous that he turns mute and inane. And when he does speak up later, one only wonders what De Beauvoir the feminist ever saw in him! This year, the Festival continued, and expanded, its welcome policy of pro gramming film not usually regarded as festival fare — begun last year with the French television section — to include refreshing and sometimes dazzling works from independent American film makers, the British Film Institute, and British television. The American documentary They Are Their Own Gifts succeeds where Simone de Beauvoir fails. Directors Lucille Rhodes and Margaret Murphy have taken a firm hold on their material to produce a warmly resonant portrait of three women artists whose social con sciousness and engagement permeate their work, and the film itself. Though more structured than the French film, its style is less obtrusive and far more lucid. In this work, a necessary connection emerges between people and events in the lives of the subjects on one hand, and their creative output on the other. Indeed life, art and politics mesh into a whole in which it is absurd to speak of one without the others. If painter Alice Neel does not seem as politically conscious as feminist 628 — Cinema Papers, December-January
and poet Muriel Rukeyser, she is no less humane or admirable. This is excellent filmmaking which gives lie to the facile idea, all too widespread, that feminist necessarily equals puritan and depress ing. Karen and David Crommie’s The Life and Death of Frieda Khalo, for all its careful research, does not come off nearly so well, mainly because the film unwittingly reveals a woman who was not the heroic figure it so earnestly wishes she was. Obsessed, yes; tragic, yes; but heroic, no. At one minute a friend tells us that Khalo is not concerned with politics, perhaps in reaction to the overtly political position of her mural-painting husband Rivera, and at the next the voice-over ex tols her involvement in a protest march against the CIA shortly before her death. To be sure, the film vividly conveys, by means of interviews and searching ex aminations of her turbulent paintings, the physical and emotional pains which wracked and killed Khalo. However, there is no virtue in sickness, and nothing courageous about obsessive work no matter how brilliant. Hollywood’s Musical Moods, by archivist Christian Blackwood, is a fine documentary which highlights the often overlooked importance of music in creating a film’s moods and themes, or, for that matter, an actor’s motifs and identity. The interview with composer Miklos Rozsa is particularly effective, since later in the Festival we heard his monumental score for The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, cunningly based on Ravel’s Concerto For Left Hand, and providing so much of the establishing mood for the film. The narrators of Hollywood’s Musical Moods, demonstrate their point about music’s integrity with editing and narrative, by re-running a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, once with Rozsa’s shivery, nudging music, and once simply with the effects. It is a con clusive demonstration. Controlling Interest, by California Newsreel, has already been seen to a lim ited extent in this country by educational short film users. It is a sear ing indictment of the methods and motives of trans and multi-national cor porations, culled largely from the un abashed statements of top executives and government leaders. The enormous and exciting diversity of
animated short films from the U.S. was showcased in New Age Animation, a welcome feature compilation of works by a number of animators. Mention should at least be made of the dense, bom bastic, mercurial Fantasy by Vincent Collins, and the self-explanatory Help I’m being Crushed to Death by a Black Triangle by Carter Burwell. Curiously, midway between the docu mentaries and the narrative features stands an uncommon hybrid called The Bushman, the first feature by David Schickele, made in 1971. Documentary footage of a Nigerian student’s life in San Francisco is interwoven with shots of his homeland, speeches to the camera, and staged but essentially non-narrative episodes detailing his encounters with a variety of characters. This unlikely subject matter and form succeeds against all odds in being revealing and entertaining. The contrast between cultures produces a fresh and poignant vision of life in mad, urban U.S. Schickele’s film ends abruptly with the voice-over announcement that Paul Opokam, friend of the director and leading player, had, before completion of shooting, been jailed and deported on
Jacques Doillon’s La drolesse: touching on the delicate subject of the abduction of a young girl by a retarded youth.
fabricated charges, a bizarre real-life ap proximation to the intended conclusion to the work. Schickele’s talent is obvious, as is that of cinematographer David Myers, who renders the material in beautifully framed and textured, generally static black and white shots which owe much to still photographic ideas of composition and lighting. The most perfectly balanced combin ation of formalism and naturalism in the whole season came from the two features by Mark Rappaport, who is a new voice presenting a totally original vision. He provides a much-needed shock of recognition. Dramatically, Local Colour, the earlier film, is the richer of the two. Its black and white photography, its minimalist sets and continuity, and its eight characters give it a greater commitment to realism. Scenic Route is richer texturally. Shot in shadowy color, It revives what are clearly his forms: postcards, diaries, slide
Broderick Crawford as J. Edgar Hoover in Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.