GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
PIECES OF THE MASTERS
After a long drought, when it had begun to look as if the
princes of distribution would never allow us a really distinctive movie again,
a number of important films have become available. Most of them became
available through the aegis of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center
which, in the twilight of its prestige, seems more necessary than eveT. I
thought the highlights this year were Robert Bresson's
Lancelot of the
Lake,
Alain Resnais's
Stavisky,
Bunuel's
The Phantom of Liberty,
Alain Tanner's
The Middle of the World
and two magical overlong movies by the little known
maste~,
Jacques Rivette
(Out One/Spectre
and
Celine andJulie Go Boating).
The
Bresson and the two Rivettes were the cream of the cream.
Bresson's dreamlike
Lancelot of the Lake,
without an American dis–
tributor at this writing, details the degeneration of Arthur's court and
Lancelot's love and renunciation of Guinevere. The film's real subject is
Bresson's odd way of perceiving an ev'!nt. He is a filmmaker mining a
highly restrictive personal mode who surprises us with each new film at the
variations possible within what seems like impossible limits. Parts of things
not only stand for the larger whole but seem to replace it in Bresson's
mis en
scene.
We see at a tournament merely the armored flank of a charging horse
or the point of a spear crashing a shield. In another odd, beautiful scene we
are shown Guinevere's reflection in a hand mirror or the mirror itself as the
childlike queen, perceiver of shadows, stares into it'while taking a bath.
Lancelot of the Lake
is a strange and mysterious work-Bresson the most
mysterious of directors-which moves us not through action or characters
but almost wholly through image and form.
Apart from the Festival, two other major directors, Bergman and
Fellini, have had new films open this fall and we have as a holdover from the
spring an impressive detective movie by Roman Polanski, an elegantly
stylized homage to the genre.
Chinatown
is Polanski's most satisfying movie
