MOVIES
423
art has to be a little boring. This basic tenet of the philistine, spoken
in the usual tone of beefy candor, is absolutely central to the instincts
of the art-cinema-Iover for the real faddist will spring into the arms of
the insupportable with a ready embrace. He will sit through comedies
that leave him frozen and pretend to himself that he is having a ball;
he will go to obscurantist movies like Bergman's and relish the fog in
his nostrils, and he will endure the tedium of Antonioni's slow-pulse
films because they so perfectly recreate the pinched character of his
own life that he takes them to be studies of the contemporary condi–
tion. The robustness of a movie like
Rocco and his Brothers
or
Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning
is something that he cannot quite face, and
he is likely to hack at it with some such cut as "theatrical"-mean–
ing that the director has been more concerned with the perform–
ances than with discussing his theory of cinema--or "old-fashioned," as
distinct from the thin cold formalism that he regards as up-to-date.
If
Griffith or Keaton or Jean Vigo were starting their work now, the art–
movie addict would be the last person to see their genius, for his responses
operate years behind the real film lover's. He depends on a received
idea of what is intellectual, or original, or entertaining, and to receive
an idea takes time: the Bergman cult was fuelled to some extent by
a feed-back from Cocteau, the American experimental movies that are
beginning to turn into a rallying point at film festivals are riding on
the back of
Shadows,
and probably even the art-movie fan would not
have been able to make anything of
Carryon Nurse
if it had not come
bumbling cheerfully along in the wake of the great days of Ealing.
The art movie is never a pioneer work in any real sense. This is
not to say that it does not often indulge in a factitious sort of device–
spinning that lards the piece with a look of newness and sends the art–
cinema theorists into paroxysms of prose.
I
would think of Alain Resnais'
VAnnie Derniere
cl
Marienbad
as a particularly high class example of
this sort of invention. Like a lot of French avant-garde art now, it gives
one a shifting sense that the authors started off by writing a critical
appreciation of the work before getting around to creating it.
The town with the highest birth rate in Britain, Harlow New Town,
has just set up a club of fifty-six members who are pledged to ban sex
from marriage. Sex, they believe, is "below the practice of the human
race;" if anyone wants children they can have them by artificial insemi–
nation, thereby conserving energy "to help to solve the world's economic
and other problems." When one reads the art-cinema magazines, one
sometimes feels that a project just as wild is under way. What randy
cinemagoer is thinking to do anything so erotic as respond to films, when
