Cinema: The Eyes Have It

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"The cinema is changing. Unless audiences catch up, they will be left behind. The onus is not on the artist; he is merely the sensitive antenna. It is we who must learn to read him."

With this hard-slung pebble for the Philistines, Director Amos Vogel of the New York Film Festival last week opened the fourth annual session of the most prestigious U.S. cinema congress. In a way, the pebble ricocheted. Too many of the far-out films shown at this year's festival tried hard to be difficult but just turned out dull. Too many others were bad jobs by good directors (Bunuel, Bresson, Godard, Torre Nilsson, Varda). Though the sponsors had doggedly previewed 400 films, their efforts failed to turn up enough hits to fill out the festival's fortnight.

Despite these demerits, Vogel & Co. presented a provocative cinematic circus. There were eye-grabbing sideshows enlivened by the thumps and grinds of U.S. independent film makers: exhibitions of Underground Cinema, Direct Cinema, and something the Marshall McLuhanatics call Expanded Cinema or Intermedia Kinetic Environment (IKE)—a sort of slap-happening half on and half off the screen. For movie goers who did not particularly like IKE, there was periodic excitement in the main tent. Seventeen nations were represented in a program that included ten or a dozen superb shorts and five fine features. Pursuing ever more strongly a direction evident for more than a decade, the new films showed more freedom of narrative form, more richness of visual vocabulary. The new moviemakers more and more firmly reject the rules of the drama, and more and more sensitively obey the laws of the eye. They mean to write with the lens and not with their pens. The festival's best:

The Hunt. A burgeoning new school of camera-wise Spaniards enters a sturdy claim for recognition in this spare, gruesome drama about a quartet of upper-crust Spanish hunters—three middle-aged malcontents and a wealthy young sprout—who slaughter rabbits for sport. The cool mechanics of death are recorded in some of the most grisly hunt scenes ever filmed, and during a long, hot afternoon the lust for killing slowly grinds toward a fitting climax. Boozing and broiling in the sun, the men try to buy, sell and slander one another. The hair triggers of anxiety touch off frustrations over their wives, mistresses, businesses, and their expanding waistlines. And at last the verbal sniping takes a deadly turn—hunters hunting hunters.

Writer-Director Carlos Saura's achievement is to arouse concern for a markedly unsympathetic crew in a credible horror story, drawing upon the well-documented history of mankind's particular gift for committing violence against his own species.

Loves of a Blonde is a boy-meets-girl comedy so fresh and unassuming that 34-year-old Writer-Director Miles Forman appears to have put it together without quite realizing the strength of his perceptions. The seeming simplicity conceals extraordinary skill: Forman observes small human aspirations very precisely, then borrows the style of a documentary to carve out a comic slice of life in swift, easy strokes.