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Patricia Marc's interview each week at this time your city station brings you an interview with a leading figure in the arts politics or the sciences and here now to introduce today's program is Patricia Marx film is the most popular art form of the day my guest is one of its most distinguished and embattled critics Mr John Simon Mr Simon is film critic for the new leader drama critic for the Hudson review and come in we'll and author of the recent book of collected film criticism in titled private screening his views of the cinema of the sixty's was just I mean you're a critic of theater novels poetry and sometimes art as well as films do you feel that film is the most vital art form of the day well I do think that because there seems to be a greater market for film because a whole new generation of young and young middle aged consumers has grown up on film having film for their very favorite and don't mess take as it were art form the demand has forced a lot of good talent to go into filmmaking and a good many people a few decades ago might have been perfectly happy to be poets or novelists or actors or play it and so. Have all converged on film which has come to look as a kind of. Band their art form of the age the kind of art form that's flashed in front of the greatest number of faces presumably leading us to greater recognition. And it can be so then yes that film is the central art form of it is them the most popular and the most meaningful to the largest number of young people do you feel the film gets the criticism it deserves no it doesn't and the film can this is a may conceivably look either easier or more difficult or at any rate different from other kinds of criticism precisely because of the kind of people who practice it rather than the very nature of the discipline by which I mean that because so many cranks on the one hand and so many fanatical are technological enthusiasts you know right about film film criticism tends to look on the one hand if it's being written by these what he mean types as being easier and less would be more foolish than it actually is or if it's written by these experts on the technological side it may then look at something more cryptic arcane. Difficult puzzling but at the same time lest they warding than other kinds of criticism it just wouldn't post is prominently featured from your book and I could hear the first and last responsibility of the critic is to raise the standard of motion pictures as a highbrow critic that writes for a. Magazine it doesn't reach too wide an audience how do you feel you will raise the standard of motion pictures Well it may be an idealistic view but then again I don't care for any viewer that is not idealistic. I feel that so many of the people practicing reviewing or criticism do it either in the spirit of supplying their reader as the newspapers with a commodity that has to be a film column and it has to be filled with eight hundred or nine hundred words in which case they have to be quite cynical and indifferent or even just plain simple minded and undiscriminating or the other types who are right films this is an out of some kind of elaborate personal love hate or love or hate they may have for the movies which leads them into some kind of fantastic ation and. And spinning of fancy do e-mails on paper but they're very few people to whom films are extremely important extremely serious genuine know it for who want the best and nothing but the best from it and I feel this is the responsibility of any serious going to now if his magazine does not reach many many leaders Nevertheless if he makes an impact on a certain number they can pass the word on to others copies of magazines can be borrowed or even passed and in some cases. If the articles are important enough they can be reprinted elsewhere they can come out in book form and the venture the word of a serious critic will reach a sufficient number of people but even if it doesn't he has to a guide with that in mind and the end is that films have to become better especially in Hollywood much too commercial sloppy gross. Brainless self-indulgent but they are that way in other countries too. The critic has to fight this tooth and nail and let the chips fall where they may if they don't fall anywhere that matters he must still try to send them there I wonder why you say this I accept the charge of being unfashionable with satisfaction and even I confess pride Why is this well because in most art forms but especially in art forms like film which appeal to. A very widely diversified group of people enclaves are coteries clique's are formed which push a certain filmmaker a certain type of filmmaking they'll be the camp group will like campy underground films there will be the young beatnik hippie type so will love the sort of irresponsible films of visual Luke God Are there will be perhaps starchy old timers who will perhaps like some old fashioned Hollywood pictures and so on but there are definitely in in film fashions and these fashions I think are the contrary of criticism they are the enemy of genuine intelligent criticism because they accept something that is motivation. In instead of something that is really good and deserving. And there are certain fashions that are clearly operating though which I think are particularly if nefarious such as the god are vulgar which I am a opposed to a very happy and proud to be opposed to you call God are the quintessential N.T. artist why are you so violently against Gadhafi well. This is something that's very hard to explain in a few words it is the longest section of my book and even at that I think it may not be long enough and may still not explain the sinister in this of this manifestation and play enough for convincing enough people to perceive but belief Lee God does a man with talent but with a mind a talent and a major ads and his kind of filmmaking consists of slapping things together he is a is a kind of spoiled child on the phone to any bill of filmmaking who has been indulged and cosseted by the coteries whose idea of filmmaking is total improvisation total freedom total. Aimlessness except indulging the whim of that morning's shooting I mean on Monday he doesn't know what he will do on Tuesday on Tuesday it does whatever comes into his head when he sits now beside the camera and so on and I'm afraid this is the same mentality which is a sponsible today for happenings for papa art for. Some kind of gross experimentation in music with with hideous sounds and even more meaningless silences other than actual melody or even anything resembling melody and this this to me is anti art in that it tries to substitute accident improvisation. Happening for ling into something for an activity namely art which to me has to be carefully thought out. Systematically planned. Deeply felt through and and ex cogitated but which of course also showed you was at times happy accidents felicities that one stumbles upon but which should not base itself on accidents and supposin Felicity but at the same time Godard's seems to speak very eloquently to the young he's certainly a much admired by the younger generation of many and generation Could this perhaps just be a generation gap being over the magical age of thirty yes I'm even though over the unmagical age of forty but the fact remains that no artist has ever been a major artist if you only addressed himself to a certain age group I don't care how popular novelist was with the five year olds or even the twelve year olds who did not on that basis become Proust or Joyce or Dickens or Tolstoy. To address oneself to people between the ages of fifteen and thirty let us say and to be enormously popular with them particularly when this group today seems to be much more fifteen than thirty and it's thinking and doing is not I think again in T.V. or even the sound indications of ones to stick supremacy perhaps he's capturing or portraying something that is very much part of the times well in order to capture and put trace something in a way to make it truly artistic and truly meaningful for anyone but the group it has to penetrate. Into the consciousness and the understanding and the sympathy of other groups as well a novel about the cell an ease that would be meaningless outside of Salaam would not be a good knowable. Playing that would be absolutely irresistible to high school students but only to high school students would not be a great play. To appeal only to a generation is not enough you're exaggerating because he feels to more than generations just. Pulling cable and you Sarah's but easy to cult among your generation Well you see this is probably one of the mind attach of this of our culture or civilization if we can honor them with those terms that the young the the charming brother sensually family irresponsible young have taken over the culture industry to a very large extent and to the extent that they haven't taken it over all the people who want to appeal to this group as a chief consuming group have taken over and that everything is now slanted in this American society which has always been fanatical about the youth anyway even before that today's various youth movements youth has been a an absolute mono mania the American consciousness so. With this emphasis on youth a lot of older people like Pauline Kael like Andrew Sarris for various reasons ranging from nostalgia to put the most benevolent interpretation of it to our hysteria to put a less benevolent interpretation on it will embrace these criteria this worship of youth but this does not mean that the average responsible person of forty or thirty eight or forty five would be convinced by. In private screenings you have a chapter called favorites and you list eleven favorites including an early selenium early Antonioni and early Bergman you know most of these all of these are fairly old films none of them less than five years old do you feel that the most recent films being made in the last five years or less good than have been that the good old days aren't are better than current cinema no masterpieces of course don't come along every day and sometimes they come in clusters in fact very often they come in clusters for reasons too complicated to go into However in the last few years. I've seen some most deserving films a few of which I can name for you which are your favorites from the last five years. Without calling all of these absolute favorites I will call them all deserving films some of them more so than others for the example Lawrence of Arabia Sundays and see Babel Mondo commie Il passed or also known as the sound of trumpets a magnificent film as is on his other work the fiance is to some extent hard. To fire with him by Louis Malle bandits of Argo solo the organizer woman in the dunes knife in the water by the woman Polanski to a lesser extent marriage Italian style nothing but a man the collector of the few American or at least partly American films on the list the fascist also known as evil for the neglected masterpiece mind a masterpiece but nevertheless love E.L.O. of their life upside down to die in Madrid the documentary family diaries to a much lesser extent the hill dear Joan. To a considerable extent Alfie to a slight extent and perhaps a Man for All Seasons and the few others which are probably not thinking at the moment in your book you seem not to like most of the recent the ME and. Even have to get to the spirits and read desert who are the younger or lesser known directors that you. Are there any people that you think will gain the stature of and then Tony. Is sure that both the only. Lean they have undergone a falling off since their masterpieces eat their lonely and love into it that on the other hand Bergman who seem to be quite dormant and. Less than spectacular in his last five or six films came spectacularly to the fore with personal note which is one of the most profound and searching the same time beautiful films of all time and it certainly belongs. In the list of the twenty or thirty best films ever made. Similarly younger filmmakers who promise well. Before we started out superb Lee. Has more they simply don't quite poorly but a man like that could buy a happy change of pace achieve something quite marvelous yet. All me mother all do you know made the absolutely first date sound of trumpets and only slightly less spectacular the feel say is good yet very great things not that those two aren't. One of the two young Swedish. Filmmakers who look very promising Polanski was started out with really smashing films knife in the water and there's been wasting his time on cheap movies may yet go up and into something very good there are checks who will promise to be quite outstanding and the Czechs have already made three or four a very fine movie since the last war most of which haven't been seen here except in special festivals the ones that have been seen actually are not the best films with the exception of closely watched train was moving absolutely the first thing so again Jell-O. Pantech although it was a documentary the Battle of Algiers a film of major importance Peter Watkins with the very fine wargame despite the unsuccessful privilege could yet produce some important film so I don't think the picture is bleak at all actually even mention any American director is by oversight or by No not that oversight it's just the only American director for whom one really rooted over the last ten or twelve years was Stanley Kubrick and I'm afraid despite doctors thing in July which was a very very worthy and very witty film and an important one. Nothing else that killed because lately as been. After what one expected the other filmmakers in this country are either working within the crippling Hollywood. State jacket where they have no independence they only. Or are two independent by which I mean they're underground or scattered or impoverished supported Unfortunately neither the foundations nor the state government has any program as yet functioning that adequately finances in the pendant filmmaking which indeed is very expensive but there are stirrings in the air which indicate that this may change for the better. What about Arthur Penn and his recent film Money and climate you see the great deal of praise but I think I said Penn is a clever but they're effective filmic I think Bonnie and Clyde is vastly over the estimated it's techniques though neat and sometimes quite effective is terribly reminiscent of LIFO and God. And other novella Wagner filmmakers. I don't is there is ultimately a lack of independent imagination only in Arthur Penn and a lack of first aid creativity in them which I think prevents him from being a major film because I think always will one of the recent developments in film which was prominently featured at Expo sixty seven has been new techniques many screen simultaneous action new forms shapes sizes screens do you feel this is helpful in promising an artistic terms you know one can always tell the middlebrow critic by the fact that he leaps into prophecy it seems that he is so bored with criticism that he likes nothing better than to put Gnostic eight about the future and they will tell you at great length that these new media are all that evolution eyes are film or inversely that they cannot contribute to storytelling and will never have any early and. Feature length story films frankly I don't know what the future holds while I care in the sense that any conceivable and they could they must care I don't do really care about it that much that I should that I should deflect any great extent of my speculative energies on that rather than judging evaluating weighing discussing feeling through and thinking through the current films which is work enough for anyone who takes criticism seriously I don't know either their parts in me which think that these new devices are very interesting parts of me which think that I cannot as yet for the life of me see how they can be put to the service of film art in the sense that I understand it and long for that. So I think we don't know but it's an ignorance which I think is a quite blissful and disturbing one. I'd like to close the interview with you reading part of your review in your current book private screening would you do that. Possibly the one memorable sentence in life's double issue on the movies so that when Doris Day parkas Senegalese and Swedes feel the touch of her lips as I am neither Senegalese nor Swedish The only thing I feel and Doris Day puckers up and we shall soon see America's sweetheart without her clothes and without her. Is nausea against my better judgment I again attempted to stomach one of her films move over darling which yet again affected me as a cross between an all day sucker and the hand painted necktie it should give us pause that Doris Day has been for years the number one box office attraction in the American cinema it should start us thinking that her sickening films have been well received by the reviewers it should make us sit up at the reputable critic on the recent T.V. show after knocking some of the films hastily added but this was not meant to minimize her talent the only very real talent Miss de possesses is that of being absolutely sanitary personality untouched by human emotions. Unclouded by human thought form and smudged by the slightest evidence of femininity. What then does it mean that this heavily sugar coated as well as sugar skinned and sugar boned pill should coax the largest number of coins from the hands of American moviegoers from the tiny sweaty ones of our young to the daintily manicured or a vet aioli her suit ones about adults only by the conjoined spending of all these hands is one anointed America's number one box office attraction now the alleged virtues of Mr Day's Persona three crisp with girlish Arabians and healthy sexuality as anyone who's scrutinized as even one of the day movies will know that the wit is so crisp that duct on your head it produces instant coma the radiance is so girlish that it has to be shot through special screens that this guy's a bad case of creeping which has begun to our advantage that once you fully incipit the face and the healthy sexuality is a cause a protracted game of teases and too blunt on the most played between husbands and wives or couples well on the way to the altar and with all ambient beds remaining relapse area and really solid what I repeat does this and then make their worship me it means that two or three generations of Americans are basking in with listeners and calling it with it in the facelessness and calling it radio in sexlessness and calling it sex in total darkness and calling it there. It means that until this Spanish. Melts for the screen there is little chance of the American films coming of age whatever delicious shivers make course up and down the spines of Senegal and sweet Mr Simon thank you my guest has been John Simon film critic for the new leader and author of the recent book private screening thank you and goodbye for now you have been listening to Patricia Marx interviews join us again next Friday at five when once again we bring you Patricia Marx interviews.