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PARTISAN REVIEW
know of no child or young person who has not been deeply impressed
by the film. It recreates "real" events that begin to form something like
a racial memory.
My third film is
Marjoe,
made by Howard Smith in 1972. Unlike
The Wild Child
it was distributed explicitly as a documentary and
received mostly brickbats from serious critics. The film treats a case of
self-confessed sham and greed in a successful evangelistic preacher.
Since the on ly foil presented for Marjoe's former hypocrisy as a tent–
crowd manipulator seems to be his nervous rapping about his past
with the hippie film crew and his rock star attitudinizing at a Village
party scene, one soon becomes impatient with the unfocused character
portrait. Has this dazzling hustler really redeemed himself? Has he
touched any bedrock of honesty or truth? The closing sequences show
Marjoe, with his black girlfriend and his dog, aping his successes as
gospel pitchman. By now one should have found the focus. Through a
gradual chemistry that gives the film its force, it is all these sneering
scenes that come through as the most meretricious of all , themselves
mocked by the reverse twist of the film as a whole. Marjoe is still a
talented charlatan, just working a new medium.
One is left with two complementary impressions. First, the film
does catch the power of language, amplified and chanted and danced
and whispered and exploded, as a creative yet dangerous instrument for
waking people from the sleep of mere li ving. Audio recording alone
could never do justice to the stage movements of such performances.
Second, the same "authentic" reviva l meeting scenes that unleash the
wizardry of language also portray the genuine yearning of the crowd to
transcend itself and its inhibitions and to reach some higher realm of
pure feeling. Marjoe's fraudulence fades to insignificance beside the
ravenous hunger with which his words are devoured. He never sees or
understands the reality that surrounds him-the reality of lived feeling.
For him it remains a commodity. This weird documentary of an
incorrigible fourflusher emits moments of ironic poetry that touch
both the people in the picture and the people watching the picture;
never Marjoe.
With all their shortcomings and despite the critical confusions
they have provoked, these three hybrid films testify to the continuing
effectiveness of the documentary even in its impure state. For purposes
of billing and classification, we would probably do well to forget about
strict discriminations. Truth may be stranger than fiction, and art may
be truer than reality. But the impulse
to
document the world –
particularly in the first, objective, window-on-the-world sense that I
proposed at the start-will continue to contribute substantially to the
total process by which movies are made.
