After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  At the screening of Star!, in the first act, I went to the ladies’ room and was sick. No fault of the film’s. Flu. Back in the screening room, not wanting to step over many feet, I took up a different seat, near the aisle. A Times reviewer, out of fairness, is never supposed to walk out of anything, but when I started to be sick again, I decided it was ridiculous to stay. I particularly waited until after the intermission, so that when the house lights went on, and then off again, I would still be clearly in my seat (one of the myths of the Times film reviewer’s power is that if the Times looks unhappy at something, the other reviewers will hate it). I waited a half hour more, and then tiptoed out. I saw the rest of the film at the last preview. A terrific fuss ensued. The PR man from Fox, finding himself at the end without the Times’s elbow to grasp or fanny to pat, called and asked for an explanation. I explained. Suddenly, a deluge of letters from Darryl Zanuck to the Times. I had left, for no reason, before the intermission. Therefore my review was short and, he felt, unkind. Mr. Daniel patiently replied. Mr. Zanuck wrote again. It went like that. Outrage. Patience. That was all.

  The people I did hear from a lot were readers—about six letters a day. “Our reader,” particularly as conceived by the culture editor, was a hypothetical, highly serious person, hanging from a subway strap, who had never read a book or seen a movie, used an obscenity or slept with anyone, but who was desperately anxious that every character, however minor, involved in any way with the making of a film should be identified by some parenthetical reference to his prior work. I began to throw in such identifications maniacally for a while, referring to winners of the Silver Arena at Pula or supporting roles in films like Three, but nobody seemed to find that funny except me, and so I stopped. “Our readers” came up a lot, particularly in truisms about good writing being simple writing and so forth, until one day I said, rather mildly I thought, that I didn’t give a damn about our reader, and the crisis passed. Speaking of damns and who gave them, there was always a little compulsion—shared by most writers for family publications I think—to sneak a little obscenity into the Times. Once, in reviewing The Killing of Sister George, I tried to say that it had some good Anglo-Saxon expletives ending in “off” and meaning “go away.” An editor who was always fair in these matters did make me give up the “ending in off.” It was some similar, though awful compulsion, I think, that made me put in some really grotesque errors in matters I knew perfectly well: type in an extra name, for example, in just copying the letters off a credit sheet, or write of the moments when the earth moved in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It was like planting mines for oneself when one is feeling guilty about expressing so many opinions about everything.

  The readers I guess I was writing for, and whom I presumed I had been hired for, were people fairly like myself, or specific friends I had had somewhere along the way. It varied a bit, depending on whom I had seen or lately read. I don’t think it is possible to write for people completely unlike yourself. I tried not to be completely negative, except about films I considered reprehensibly rotten, and the readers I heard from were often kind—although certainly not always. After the Green Berets review, among highly imaginatively obscene or physically threatening mail, there was an anonymous soul who sent me each week, addressed to Red Renata Adler, his losing tickets from Aqueduct. After several pieces attacking the Left, there were similar letters from the other side. And of course, there were always highly intelligent critical letters as well—and eleven humorous ones after the San Luis Rey debacle. I tried to answer all of them, although, being fairly messy with bills and papers, I lost a few. There was naturally some crazy mail, which I tried to answer seriously too. Just once, at a low time, I used the senatorial gambit for writing to weird vituperative constituents: “Dear Sir, I think I ought to inform you that some preliterate lunatic has been writing me letters and signing your name.” Inevitably, I chose the wrong case. I got an immediate reply. The reader answered that, though he had perhaps been a bit harsh, he was certainly no lunatic, and he hoped that I bore him no ill will. The nicest mail was from people who wrote as though they thought I was having a hard time.

  In a way, I guess I was. What I wanted to do with the job was to try, as a just-under-thirty person then, of fairly contemporary experience, to review films in earnest (or in fun, depending on the film) with a bit more tension and energy than the traditional paper way. I was trying to shorten and tighten the daily pieces from what they had been before, and expand the range sometimes. In particular, I wanted drastically to change the redundancy of the Sunday articles. (It seemed absurd to rephrase every Sunday the reviews I had done on weekday afternoons.) None of this quite worked out. One continual problem was control. I was forever trying to do in a line something that should have been a piece, and making a piece out of what might have amounted to a line, and frazzling tone. I never seemed able to get it right. There was a special complication with what I can only call the easy victories. That is, I have a personal suspicion of critical writing that comes easily, of felicitous accidents. In criticism, I think there ought to be evidence of time taken, trouble ironed out, of a kind of American Gothic zeal for suffering. It makes the doing of criticism have some risks of its own and it seems more fair. Yet what would happen is that the dashed-off pieces, the unearned lines almost always worked out best. It was like being told, as people often are, that a shoddy piece of work is the best thing they have ever done. It leaves one somehow off-stride with fate. And often, I did wind up recapping in Sunday pieces, either because it was late Monday night and I did not have a thought in my head, or to go back to films and try to get the proportion right, or because repetitions somehow became inadvertent rest stops in my mind.

  Some of the nicest times were when events in the outside world were allowed to impinge—the strikes in Paris and Cannes, the Evelyn Waugh disturbances in Venice, meeting the Czech directors, their doubts in the spring, their absolute despair in France and Italy in summer, meeting artists in those weeks, following them about and doing criticism of some films that mattered a bit. The little dramas of solid Times reporting came up then too: having to cross borders in hired cars to phone stories for deadlines during strikes; barricades; and, when I knew I couldn’t possibly face another Sunday piece, Cuba—where, though it turned out the international desk had been banned for a year, the culture desk was not. It was in travelling too that I discovered that, in newspaper terms, the culture copy desks had been treating me, when I was at home, with their own version of restraint. A story of marathon private strike meetings in Paris, on which the desk really got its chance, was rewritten top to bottom, with mistakes. The Cuba pieces presented problems of their own. Since regular Times reporters were still banned, the stories got treated a little as though they were news (the first piece, for instance, appeared on the front page), and it was a kind of writing I was only trying to learn about. But politics at other times (in a year when notoriety and power, media performance and political act, were becoming confused from Washington to Columbia) seemed to occur in writing about movies anyway.

  In time, in just struggling with the pace and form, I think there began to be a kind of continuity—not the continuity exactly of criticism or prose, but a record of what movies come out in the course of a year, what movies there actually are, and what it can be like for somebody to go to nearly all of them. With all the truisms about the glamour and vitality of the medium, reviewing it daily turned into a kind of journal, with spells of anger, friendliness, ideas, just being tired—the movies themselves coming over the hills in swarms, so many of them nearly undistinguishable, some of them really fine. I have cut little except the purest redundancies, and left some of those. I thought I’d like to record the balance of films just about the way it was for one year, from Elke Sommer and Norman Mailer through festivals, George C. Scott, Truffaut and theaters like the Lyric and the Amsterdam. About a film every other day. I guess I believe things now, about film sex, horror, plot, satire, empathy, foreign languages, ol
d prints, criticism, audio-visual aids, inter-generational dirty jokes, cinémathèques, color films, the reviewable quality of TV commercials and so on, that I hadn’t thought about before, but they are in here somewhere without any logic except that of newspaper space and time. I am still taken with a thought about plotless absurdism and its relation to a new value system in which the quality of events is regarded as neither desirable nor undesirable—in which it is desired only that something should happen, no matter what. The happening as a value. I think it runs deeply counter to existentialism, and that it is dangerous to life. It occurred to me at the end of my first review of Faces—a film which, incidentally, because of schedulings, I reviewed four times. But a year in the dark consisted far more truly of stories and actors, directors and theaters, and seeing them to write really entailed about 160 collisions of one’s own experience with Doris Day’s, Jean-Luc Godard’s, Kahlil Gibran’s or Sidney Poitier’s. And here it is, not an encyclopedia of movie statistics, or selected critical essays, but the whole peculiar year.

  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

  ON VIOLENCE

  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

  Originally titled “The Movies Make Heroes of Them All”

  THREE CUBAN CULTURAL REPORTS

  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.