After the Tall Timber (38 page)

Some pleasant things happened near the end: a screening of
Yellow Submarine
at which so many of the under-forty reviewers were resolutely seeing it through once with pot that a police raid would have seriously diminished the number of reviews next day; a movie desk memo saying that Roberto Rossellini’s
Axe of the Apostles
would be screened that afternoon; and a meeting of the New York Society of Film Critics, for the annual awards. I had never gone to its meetings before. (I had seen most of the critics at screenings throughout the year, of course.) This was different. As the voting went from what I thought was mediocrity to mediocrity, as it began to be clear that criticism is everybody’s personal word and certainly not a court or a democracy, I decided to walk out. I had never done anything remotely like walking out of something to resign and I didn’t do it very well. Stefan Kanfer of
Time
and Richard Schickel of
Life
whispered kindly that I should sit down again, since they were planning to walk out too, and had a statement prepared. I sat down and sent a note to Vincent Canby, who agreed. The statement, Mr. Schickel’s, I think, was read. There were expressions of outrage, and of regret. Joseph Morgenstern of
Newsweek
said he had walked out once, but discovered that it made no difference. It seemed to me, though, that if
Time, Life
and the
Times
walked out, there would be, in effect, no New York Society of Film Critics. In the end, we all settled for a change of rules, and thought we might resign later, one by one, more quietly. I did realize that a lifelong member of a society of film critics was not something I would like to be. I had known for some time that a year at the movies—at a time when I was at the end of a tether of some kind, wanted to drop out of life for a bit and yet try to cope, about as audibly as some new journalist, with things I cared about—was fine for me, but that it was about enough.

March 1969

FILM ALWAYS ARGUES YES

THE MOTION picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people—on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes; or that the brutal hangings in
The Dirty Dozen
and
In Cold Blood
will convert one soul from belief in capital punishment. No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes. People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind. If you want to make a pacifist film, you must make an exemplary film about peaceful men. Even cinema villains, criminals and ghouls become popular heroes overnight (a fact which
In Cold Blood
, more cynically than
The Dirty Dozen
, draws upon). Movies glamorize, or they fail to glamorize. They cannot effectively condemn—which means that they must have special terms for dealing with violence.

I do not think violence on the screen is a particularly interesting question, or that it can profitably be discussed as a single question at all. Every action is to some degree violent. But there are gradations, quite clear to any child who has ever awakened in terror in the night, which become blurred whenever violence is discussed as though it were one growing quantity, of which more or less might be simply better or worse. Violence to persons or animals on film (destruction of objects is really another matter) ranges along what I think is a cruelty scale from clean collision to protracted dismemberment. Clean collision, no matter how much there is of it, is completely innocent. It consists, normally, of a wind-up, a rush, and an impact or series of impacts; and it includes everything from pratfalls, through cartoon smashups, fistfights in westerns, simple shootings in war films, multiple shootings in gang films, machine gunnings, grenade throwings, bombings, and all manner of well-timed explosions. Most often, thorough and annihilating though it may be, a film collision has virtually no cruelty component at all. It is more closely related to contact sport than to murder, and perhaps most nearly akin, in its treatment of tension, to humor. I am sure that such violence has nothing to do with the real, that everyone instinctively knows it, and that the violence of impact is among the most harmless, important, and satisfying sequences of motion on film.

Further along the cruelty scale, however, are the individual, quiet, tidy forms of violence: poisonings and stranglings. Their actual violence component is low, they are bloodless but, as any haunted child knows, their cruelty component can be enormous. The tip-off is the sound track; abrupt, ingratiating, then suddenly loud, perhaps including maniacal laughter—the whole range of effects that the radio-and-cinema-conditioned ear recognizes as sinister—to approximate the nervous jolt of encounters with violence in reality. Further yet along the scale are the quick and messy murders with knives or other instruments (some uncharacteristically ugly impact scenes also fall into this category) and finally, the various protracted mutilations.

I do not know whether scenes of persons inflicting detailed and specific physical sufferings on other persons increase the sum of violence in the world. There are probably saints who dote upon amputations, and certainly sadists who cannot stand the sight of blood. But I think the following rules are true: violence on the screen becomes more cruel as it becomes more particular and individual; and it is bad in direct proportion to one’s awareness of (even sympathy with) the detailed physical agonies of the victim. What this amounts to, of course, is a belief that films ought to be squeamish. In life, it is different: awareness of the particular consequences of acts is a moral responsibility and a deterrent to personal cruelty.

The difference between film and life on this point, I suppose, is this: that an audience is not responsible for the acts performed on screen—only for watching them. To be entertained by blasts, shots, blows, chairs breaking over heads, etc., is not unlike being entertained by chases, bass drums, or displays of fireworks; to be entertained by their biological consequences is another thing entirely. An example, again from
The Dirty Dozen:
in one scene, a demented soldier, rhythmically and with obvious pleasure, stabs a girl to death; in another, a château full of people is blown up by means of hand grenades dropped down gasoline-drenched air vents, and nearly everyone else is mowed down by machine-gun fire. In real life, or in ethics seminars, one person dying slowly is less monstrous than a hundred blowing sky high. Not so, I believe, on film, for none of the deaths was real, and only one was made cruel and personal. The style of the Armageddon was most like the style of an orchestra; the style of the stabbing was too much like violence in fact. And while I don’t suppose that anyone will actually go out and emulate the stabbing, I don’t think dwelling on pain or damage to the human body in the film’s literal terms can ever be morally or artistically valid either. Physical suffering in itself is not edifying, movies celebrate, and scenes of cruel violence simply invite the audience to share in the camera’s celebration of one person’s specific physical cruelties to another.

The New York Times
January 7, 1968

WITH FILMS SOMEWHERE IN THEM

HAVANA

IN THIS year of severe rationing and shortages of nearly everything material, Cuban cultural life is particularly active, and under stress. With so little else available, Cubans spend a lot of what free time there is on the arts, and cultural priorities within the revolution have always been extremely high. Dance, writing, theater, painting, films and poster art travel in “itinerant exhibitions” to the remote provinces, Oriente and Camaguey. The jury for the Casa de las Americas prize in art and literature has gone this year, for symbolic reasons, to deliberate in an agricultural settlement on the Isle of Pines, where students from the Havana Art Institute are already spending their forty-five days cutting sugar cane.

Cuban art, conscious of the experience of socialist realism in the Soviet Union, appears relatively free so far of what the Cubans call
panfleto
, that is, flat propaganda work. But the arts in Cuba are, after all, administered by the Cuban Cultural Council, which is an agency of the government, and although its various bureaus—cinema, publishing, theater and so on—have so far determined on their own what degree of artistic freedom is admissible, there are forces gathering to suppress work that does not entirely reflect a propaganda line. At Havana’s Teatro García Lorca, the Cuban National Ballet, directed by the internationally known choreographer Alberto Alonso, and starring Alicia Alonso and Maya Plisetskaya’s brother, Azari Plisetski, is now staging a production of
Romeo and Juliet.
Set to electronic music and jammed even in rehearsal by enthusiastic crowds, the production ends with a little speech explaining the moral of the story: Two lovers cannot oppose the system alone. It requires a united effort of the people.

A solid production with just a fillip of political commitment has become characteristic of much of Cuban art in the last ten years, and has developed certain stylistic values of its own. But some ideologues are beginning to demand a more thorough political orientation. A series of four pseudonymous articles last fall in the military magazine
Verde Olivo
attacked the “depoliticalization” of much of Cuban art, particularly two works, a book of poems,
Outside the Game
by Heberto Padilla, and a play,
Seven Against Thebes
by Anton Arrufat, which won the prizes of the Cuban Artists and Writers Guild, UNEAC, last year. The articles suggested worthy future subjects—heroism during Hurricane Flora, for example—for revolutionary art and deplored less committed work as counterrevolutionary. The attack went unanswered for three months. Mr. Padilla, whose poetry was denounced for its “pessimism” (his poems imply that individuals are inevitably crushed by historical forces), had already lost his job at
Granma
, a government newspaper, and has not been granted the trip abroad that is part of the guild prize. The contested book of poems also includes these lines: “I live in Cuba. Always / I have lived in Cuba. These years of wandering / through the world, of which they have spoken so much / are my lies my falsifications. / Because I have always been in Cuba.”

Mr. Arrufat’s play, denounced for its “pacifist” elements (all war is depicted in horrible terms), has not been produced, but both
Seven Against Thebes
and Mr. Padilla’s
Outside the Game
have been published in a UNEAC edition—with two conflicting introductions. The first, by writers who belong to UNEAC, disclaims the poems and play but defends the freedom to publish them. The other, by members of UNEAC’s international jury, defends Padilla’s poems in the strongest terms. Earlier this month, Haydée Santamaria, a heroine of the revolutionary battle of the Moncada who is now head of the Casa de las Américas (an institute for Cuban cultural exchange with the rest of Latin America), suggested that the UNEAC jury consist only of Cuban writers in 1969.

Cuban filmmakers are now preparing to publish a position paper of their own—which will be the first public answer to the
Verde Olivo
line of attack. The six-page “Declaration of the Cuban Cineastes” will deplore equally the “clean hands” and “pure vocation” of liberal writers, who, in trying to prove their independence of ideology, produce “reactionary” art, and the “timid and bureaucratic” dogmatists, who, in trying to control development of the arts, occupy a “masked” counterrevolutionary position as well. The young filmmakers will advocate free artistic expression, not too “lazy” to take the aims of the revolution into account; their guardedly liberal statement is expected, in the intellectual community, to bring the controversy to a public crisis of some kind.

The last time the issue of artistic freedom arose in Cuba on a major scale was in 1961 when a documentary film,
P.M.
, which showed drunkenness and decadence in Havana nightclubs, was suppressed. Cuban artists and intellectuals protested vigorously, until Premier Fidel Castro, in a famous speech to the intellectuals, stated his position on freedom in the arts: “What are the rights of revolutionary writers and artists? Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, no rights whatsoever.”

Among the writers opposing the suppression of
P.M.
was Guillermo Cabrera Infante, then editor of
Lunes de Revolución
, a Cuban cultural journal. The journal was discontinued, and Mr. Cabrera Infante, who has since left Cuba, is now conducting an important correspondence in an Argentine periodical,
Primera Plana
, protesting Cuban censorship. It was after praising
Tres Tristes Tigres
, a book by the emigrant Cabrera Infante, as the best Cuban novel since the revolution, and after dismissing as unimportant a book by Lisandro Otero, vice president of the Cultural Council, that Mr. Padilla lost his job at
Granma.

It might be assumed that artists who have not left Cuba after ten revolutionary years are demonstrably “within the revolution,” but the present crisis seems a kind of testing of the still ambiguous and contradictory grounds, to determine whether Cuba is about to undergo what seems to many a historically inevitable tightening of control. The situation this year is different from 1961: Problems in the arts are ironically complicated by the fact that, except for the economic blockade—which many Cubans credit with having strengthened the country and unified the people—pressures from the United States have become less apparent. They appear, more subtly, as a Cuban internalization of the values of American culture itself. At every cultural level, for a newly literate people, past and present are learned together, and the weight of cultural history as well as the weight of contemporary art naturally falls on the side of peoples who have been literate for some time. A generation too young to remember Batista, the early struggles, illiteracy or real underdevelopment is growing up. And there exists a contingent of youth that Cuban intellectuals refer to as “snob”—bored with revolutionary discipline and fascinated by American life styles, American films, American rock (a Beatle-like group called Los Meme is greeted with screams; a Havana youth newspaper reports solemnly that the Mamas and Papas are breaking up), and what an official for Cuban television calls the American “Queen for a Day Psychology.” Minor leanings in this line are tolerated, but students who drop out too firmly or too conspicuously are likely to be expelled from the schools and sent to the provinces for “agricultural re-education.”