160
PARTISAN REVIEW
scrappy and opportunistic, and lives from hand to mouth by hustling reli–
gious pictures on the street, turns emotionally sensitive as she first wonders
about, and then keeps visiting, the comatose young girl in whose apartment
she lives .
This compassionate production ended this year's film festival. Most of
the presentations 1 got to see were gratifYing as entertainment, although in
some instances scenes could have been shortened. Others tried too hard
to
get a message across, and a few shorts were rather sophomoric. As I have
indicated throughout this much too brief overview, the technical aspects
of these films frequently were stupendous. Ul timately, the universal mes–
sages to the audience have been most effective when the particular has
come alive-whether in Iran, Italy, or Japan; in Portugal, Austria, or
Denmark; in Stalin's Russia, the former Yugoslavia, or Washington's black
ghetto. That is why, of course, this might have been the year that celebrat–
ed the directors. I was made aware, also, that there exists a large contingent
of good young actors who have not yet attained stardom. Overt politics
played almost no role at all- unless we consider the representative nature
of the selections themselves as politically motivated.
COMING SOON IN PR:
• Denis Donoghue ,
" Ireland: R ace, N ation , State"
• John Patrick Diggins,
"Pragmatism for Adults"
• Amos Oz
on Kafka and C hekhov
• Walter Laqueur,
"The Fate of a Generation"
• Leonard Michaels,
"Nachmanl1 at the Races"
• Jeffrey Herf
on the Sixties, and
• poetry from
Ted Hughes, W. S. Merwin,
and
Zbigniew Herbert
