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| Notes |
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By N.O. Grace Copyright © 1979 by Cinemonkey (Charles H. Johnson and D.K. Holm). All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by permission. Online version Originally published in Cinemonkey 16, Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 1979, pages 4-5. Note about this reproduction: Punctuation, spelling and typographical errors have been corrected. Breaks in words and paragraphs indicate the original publication’s page breaks for reference purposes. Page 4 Cinemonkey always began each issue with short notes by Mr. Grace on film and related topics. |
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Stanley Kauffmann said it all in the lead to his review of A Wedding (New Republic, 23 September 1978, pages 26-27): “Now Robert Altman has found a new way to insult his profession.” Kauffmann has become increasingly more interesting to us in the recent past, for his quirky, personal, and casual writing style. I don’t think many critics hold up to a survey of their columns at one sitting: Sarris and Simon do, Kael and Schickel don’t (for this reader, anyway). Kauffmann does. Though he is one of those reviewers that one is supposed to like, as dictated by the invisible network of film do’s and don’t’s, reading his most recent collection, Living Images (Harper and Row) has been a delightful and refreshing experience. He actually enjoys movies, although those I’ve talked to about him have the impression, not based on actual exposure, that he does not. Yet he is one of the few majors that wrote positively of CE3K, which was also one of the best reviews I’ve ever read of any movie (New Republic, 10 December 1977, pages 20-22). Also interesting was Roger Greenspun’s consideration of the science fiction film in Penthouse. I’ve liked him ever since that wonderful piece in Film Comment on getting fired by The New York Times, which had a great Scanlons-esque muckraking air to it. Unfortunately we don’t see much of him. He writes enthusiastically of Sissy Spacek in Danny Peary’s Christmas gift book, Close-ups (Workman Publishing), which is, I’m afraid, a somewhat essential volume due to its all-emcompassing nature. Especially recommended is Sergio Leone on Henry Fonda, pages 535-536. Speaking of CE3K, I recommend Jump Cut number 18, an issue that will not make many friends among the fannish, what with its double broadside against both the Spielberg film and Star Wars. I think the Star Wars by Dan Rubey is better than the CE3K by Robert Entman and Francie Seymour (too many cooks, perhaps) and both of them say more or less what you’d expect, but there is such a barrage of detail that the reader is more than overwhelmed by the fascist subtext in the two films. I felt very naïve after reading the articles. However, I still like CE3K, which goes to show how deply rooted ideology is. Jump Cut strikes me as one of those film magazines that everyone thinks should be published but never actually reads (I read every damn page of the thing), and I can see why: they don’t like anything, unless it’s some African documentary directed collectively. I urge everyone to subscribe, however, if it only allows them to switch from the old Rolling Stone format, to that of a real magazine, where the ink doesn’t come off on your fingers. (Six dollars for four issues a year from Jump Cut, P.O. Box 865, Berkeley, CA 94701.) An important source volume has emerged from the Northwest Media Project in Portland, Oregon, called Oregon Filmmakers: A Statewide Directory of Filmmakers and Filmmaking Services. Martha Gies is Director of the Project, Melissa Marsland and David Gettman edited the book, which is essential to anyone interested in local filmmaking or who may plan to do film work in Oregon. Queries should be sent to the Northwest Media Project, P.O. Box 4093, Portland, Oregon 97208. Also available, for two dollars, is a handy pamphlet entitled, “Copyright Primer for Film and Video,” by lawyer Joseph Sparkman. In the 11 November 1978 Boston Real Paper is a fascinating account by Audie Bock of his stint as translator for Akira Kurosawa on his recent visit to the U.S. Visiting L.A., K (as he is called) meets Pakula, and they discuss horses; Paul and Leonard Schrader (there is mention of the Ozu-inspired shots in Blue Collar), Paul asking which script K found the most difficult to write; George Lucas and Irvin Kershner; and later in San Francisco he meets Wim Wenders and Coppola, who shows him a bit of Apocalypse Now (“War films rarely look realistic to me, but this is the first truly frightening battle footage I’ve ever seen,” commented K). I won’t spoil all the surprise of reading the piece, which is excellent, by further quoting. Another under-recognized magazine seems to me to be the Quarterly Review of Film Studies which has done some incredible work the past few years — the last number 3/3 was devoted to “the application of semiology and structuralism to practical film criticism,” with excellent articles on Buñuel, Roeg, and 2001. 3/4 has a dense but interesting article by Christine Gledhill called “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism.” The address is Redgrave Publishing Company, 430 Manville Road, Pleasantville, New York 10570. They also print the best book reviews this side of The Velvet Light Trap. In my last column I discussed a popular television commercial, and this time I’d like to turn the reader’s attention to a certain series, analyzing it in terms of its ritual appeal to a mass audience. If I choose Gilligan’s Island it is because I remember from college days an article in the school paper, a facetious Freudian analysis of the show. If I appropriate some of the article’s ideas (which are very shadowy in my memory; it is not clear whose ideas are whose) it is not for the purpose of high comedy, although this effect is inevitable. At any rate it is the weekly prologue/credit sequence that is the focus of my attention. The Skipper and Gilligan take their boat out on a charter, which consists of the Howells, Mary Ann, the Professor, and Ginger, a Marilyn Monroe parody. No logical or plot reason is given as to why all these people should be on board at the same time, but there is obvious thematic relevance in that there is a cross section, as I will show, of sexual attitudes. The ship sets |
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out from a sunny, crowded port. A storm comes up. The ship is tossed. Everyone ends up stranded on a deserted island. As we come to know them in the series each of the characters is a variation on the ‘problem’ of sex, with the latently homosexual Laurel and Hardy relationship of the Skipper and Gilligan, the girl next door, the sex symbol, the sexless but rich older couple, and the intellectual (the most isolated character, having his own private hut). But why are these people trapped? In the early sixties an upwardly mobile society, suddenly finding itself with a lot of free time and money on its hands, became sex-obsessed, and it was disconcerting for a repressed society organized around the work ethic to have to confront a leisure-time morality where sexual pleasure is the only goal. Each week the psychic turmoil beneath or near the surface of the unconscious finds answers to its anxiety in the well-known programs on television, the source of stasis also for many other anxieties. The communal unity of millions of Americans indulging all at the same time in a weekly ritual is staggering. But in what, with Gilligan’s Island, are we indulging? Their boat is a phallic symbol. Both Gilligan and the Skipper are sexless. On the cruise (a pleasure cruise) the ship is tossed about by a storm. In dreams the sea is a fairly constant symbol for the unconscious, or in Jungian psychology, the female principle, depending, of course, on other personality characteristics. The ship cannot handle the tempest of the sea, that is, female desire (or wrath), the female now being stirred up by the phallus. The ship is the Minnow, a small fish, i.e., a small penis, unable to satisfy woman. Before the cast appears on the island the last image is of the wheel spinning out of control. This symbol of psychological wholeness shows the individual out of control, “off-course” and so on. The characters end up alone on an island, which translates as: the impotence of the penis, unable to satisfy women, leads to societal isolation and asexuality. Each character shows some inability to deal with sexuality. Both the Professor and Mary Ann are ignorant of the subject (which may be why they are the “least important” members of the cast, for a long time not even named in the theme song). The Howell’s have sublimated their sexual drives into greed. Ginger parodies the sex symbol, an exaggeration of desire, and hence a compensation for root incomprehension. The Skipper is the super-ego, undesirable because of his age and weight, a slight hint of the quasi-homosexual relationship of Laurel and Hardy (they are the only two men to share a hut). Gilligan is the id figure, unleashing chaos and disorder by his bumbling, but also often solving their problems. Clearly he is aware of sex, but it is the awareness of an adolescent. His red short suggests the essential sexual nature of his being, and he is the only one capable of climbing the periodic phallic coconut trees, but he is repressed (by the affectation of sexual ignorance) and suppressed (by the Skipper). This structure is presented each week in the credit sequence, and it is maddening in its repetition. But that repetition is crucial to the psychological lives of the viewers, however, who relish the redundancy. The credit sequences in popular shows usually have the goal of defining the character relations and engage the psychological transition to the myth-making (which is why they take up so much airtime). Sex is significant in each episode, like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, for the simple fact that it is never mentioned. A vision of America with provisions for the separation of the sexes. Sex is rarely even joked about, with all the leering frustration of current shows. Sex is an issue only when someone needs something and calls upon Ginger to enact a Pavlovian reward parody. In the long run this makes little sense, since no one ever makes a sexual advance to another, rendering her come-on more erratic than erotic. With the passing of post-Kennedy absurdism to the sexless seventies and selfish pursuit of vicarious pleasure, the show peaked and declined. Also, only so many plot twists can be squeezed out of the premise. We are today offered pratfalls in place of sex, and Charlie’s Angels is like a bra with built-in nipples; one has the thrill of going braless, without the moral horror of actually doing so. Television only creates more distance between us and art, by the way it separates experience into discrete units, and we stand before art, as we stand before life, unable to understand it to such a degree we are unaware of our misunderstanding, a situation protrayed in the untitled poem by John Litsis for which I have received permission to reprint in full: My Master’s made me standing proud, I circle round it for a better view My diamond glitters in the ebony sheen. Step, one, two, plie, step, three, four . . .
I have managed to find a few stills from the film, reproduced here and on the inside-back cover, in an effort to, in some small way, call for the release of this film made by a Cannes winner (for Scarecrow). The cast of the film include Franklyn Ajaye and was photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, with a script by J. Perla and Marilyn Goldin. Unfortunately I cannot assure MGM of a huge hit with the film. In fact I’m positive it would fall, just as Corvette Summer, another MGM film with an ironic attitude toward car culture and materialism, failed (what a double-bill!), but to keep this picture unavailable is a sad affair. I am not going to moralize at Hollywood about respecting art. After all, the place is devoted first and foremost to business. But perhaps the studios could turn these lost films over to archives and museums, for sizable tax breaks, and to bolster their collective images in the eyes of those who complain, rightfully, about the industry’s complete disregard for its own past. • |
The 18 December issue of New West contains an article by Tony Peyser entitled “Please Release Me,” concerning unreleased Hollywood films. I remember a similar article from an old American Film on this interesting subject. I also remember hearing about the newest Jerry Schatzberg film a few years ago and never seeing it. Writes Peyser: “This story of a car thief (Stockard Channing) and her lawyer (Sam Waterston) was shot on a low budget in Seattle in 1975. [The All American Girl] got invited to the Cannes Film Festival, where Channing was being mentioned for best actress and the film got some good reviews. A June or July release date was set for the MGM-UA production, but it never came through. Studio money was spent, however, on marketing research to determine the best possible title. After a brief interlude in which the film was called Dandy, the All American Girl, the final change was made to Sweet Revenge. The movie cruised through Yugoslavian and Dallas Film Festivals but coughed and wheezed to a halt in the U.S.” (At the end of the article there is a list of 25 more tantalizing films buried in studio vaults.)