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January 29, 1969 - Image 2

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Publication:
The Michigan Daily, 1969-01-29

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Page Two

THE MICHIGAN DAILY

,Wednesday, January 29, 1969

Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Wednesday, January 29, 1969

arts festival

cinema

East Bound Mound: Kick out the

jams

Zita: Retracing old themes

By W. REXFORD BENOIT
Not often these days do we
get to see high-energy stuff
like the East Bound Mound for
free.
Too often we sit around list-
ening to low-energy pop-rock
junk, ingesting low-power dope
that cost an arm and a leg, and
pondering all the bullshit that's
going down these days.
OK, friends, if you saw the
East Bound Mound last night,,
read no further. Words are
usually an adulteration of expe-
rience. That's the lesson of to-
day. Double for arts reviews and
political commentary.
After all, God didn't give Wil-
liam F. Buckley, Jr., the gift
of vocabulary. It was merry,
prankish Salvador Dali who did
it.
On, to the East Bound Mound.
It (they? she? he?) is com-
posed of musicians from here-
today, gone-tomorrow Ann Ar-
bor bands like The Fox and
Long Island Sound, and four
talented actors from the speech
department.
(All four - Jim Hosbein, Bob
McGill, Gilda Rattner, and
Mound mentor John Slade --
will be in the '69 Musket produc-
tion of "Camelot." See them.)
Last night the format was,
roughly, music alternating and
sometimes interacting with the
players' improvisations.
The first half lumbered along,
troubled 'by sometimes lousy
music. Gilda did a great drama-
tic reading, prefaced by her
copious laughter, of the Beatle's
"Why don't we do it in the
road."
Now that's funny.
(In the second half, she sang
it. That's twice as funny.)

McGill did a bit as a poli-
tician hung up in cliches that
have,' through the ages, m ad e
men brave enough to go to war,
e.g., "We will fight them on
the beaches . . . ", constantly
interrupting himself to blurt
another, better valorous word.
The band played an imita-
tion of Butterfield's arrange-
ment of "Get out of my life,
woman," poorly, did another
song and quit for intermission.
The depressing thing about
music that isn't quite good
enough it that it makes us feel
artificial boundaries that don't
really exist.
If, for example, you're into
the MC5, you know the poten-
tial liberating force of good
music.
However, the band got it to-
gether for the second r half.
Slade had explained during the
intermission that the drummer
was not a regular and didn't
know the arrangements.
First off, Hosbein lip-synch-
ed and danced to old rock-and-
roll music recorded by (I think)
the Four Seasons. That's fun-
ny, if not an original idea. A
hard act to follow.
And if McGill hadn't boldly
followed it, we would've' been
forced to sit in an emptyf ball-
room and entertain ourselves,
so McGill followed it.
He played with an imaginary
bird, capturing it in his fist and
pulling off first the feathers
and finally the legs, popped it
in his mouth and ate it.
Now that's hilarious.
More mediocre music. This
time a copy from the Cream's
pop smash "Sunshine of your
love."
Then McGill and Hosbein did
a religious argument between a
dogmatist and a doubter, who

By DAVID LLOYD
Aunt Zita is giving a piano
lesson' in her comfortable pic-
ture-bestrewn apartment. The
sirens blare out: noontime, and
the lesson is over. She begins
to prepare lunch, but suddenly
the sirens signal a new mean-
ing: an air-raid, a stroke. Yel-
lowed filmclips of death and
destruction and the Spanish
Civil War flash and fade in-
to the droning meow of a
Siamese cat.
Such is the environment
which gives Zita leaving t h e
Campus today, its impetus; the
event which Annie, Zita's niece,
confronts as she enters the
apartment.
The film makes the fair as-
sumption that coming to terms
with experience is intensely
personal, or, from the aud-
ience's points of view, that sym-
pathy is not empathy.
In this context, we follow An-
nie's coming to terms with life,
but we follow, we never iden-
tify. The experience w h i c h
Director Robert Enrico weaves
out of Annie's becoming c o n -
tains all sorts of associations
with other films.
The movie's timeless quality
as well as Annie's actions sug-
gest the abstruseness of Belle
du Jour. Her concerns are sim-
ilar in nature to the kind of
honest development of Rachel,,
Rachel. The photography,
evokes, at times, the redolent
beauty of Elvira Madigan.
But the dynamism A n ni e
creates is all her own. Joanna
Shimkus plays a vigorous and
restless Annie, whose diffidence
somehow generates a keen self-
awareness, divorced from t h e
nagging question of why. She
slides from emotion to emotion,
from telling her mother "I
can't leave. She' needs me," to
telling a cop "I'm fed up with
good people." Miss Shimkus'
stiff acting gradually eases in-
to the grace, and maturity
which characterizes Annie at
the end.
And the movie has a curious
way of luring the viewer into
Annie's development. The bed-
room scene with her base-fiddle
playing, car-racing, cavalier
LII

captures all the coyness as well
as beauty, all the tension as
well as acceptance, which that
act symbolizes.
We reminesce. Waking up.
Annie steals away from her
lover's apartment. She imagines
her dead Aunt Zita: she realiz-
es her lost virtue. She is play-
ing . hide and seek with her
aunt, at the country-house, this
time as a child.
: In spite of the buoyancy Miss
Shimkus invests in the role of
Annie. the film itself, in theme
and development, has the po-
tential of becoming life any
other sentimental cliche on the
emergence of identity.
Fortunately, Director Enrico
comprehends this problem, and
seeks a technical solution: new
camera angles and perspectives
with which t'o impart a kind of
restiveness parallel to Annie's
own. The pace of the film is
varied as well, using slow-mo-
tion to enhance Annie's dreams.
A unity is imposed on Annie's
sequence of experiences by the
intermittent piano and guitar
music, as well as by the direc-
tor's ability to blend images, as
when the camera moves uncon-
sciously from the ticking of a
metronome to the heavy breath-
ing of Aunt Zita. Such effects
augment the original screenplay
by Lucienne Hamon. By avoid-
ing sentimentalism and keep-
ing Annie's pursuit of her self
moving at a suitable briskness,
the audience remains absorbed.
The difficulty of the film, is,
perhaps, that it relies too much
on Annie's self-indulgent and
existential frolic. Although the
other roles are well-cast, they
remain cardboard figures
throughout the film. Only Aunt

Zita, played by Katina Paxinou,
conveys through her homely
red-knitted shawl and portly
stature someone who could elicit
the deep sense of attachment
which obviously existed between
Annie and herself. Unfortunate-
ly, her role is relatively small.
The other characters appear
to be pawns who mingle but
never touch Annie's life as she
bounces from one to the other
in her diffident but determined
fashion. Bernard Fresson, the
lover, never takes the cue from
Miss Shimkus and never re-
sponds to her more and more
easy and carefree acting style.
Somewhere, somehow, sub-
stance seems to be lacking. It
was fun to follow Annie around;
but director, writer, and actress
combine to present only the il-
lusion of something significant.
In any event, what it lacks in
metaphysics it produces in an
abundance of spontaneity, and
its message, a plea for joie de
vivre, .emerges through the ef-
fervescent character of Annie.
CINEMA Ii
THE
PAWN BROKER
ROD STEIGER
7-9 P.M.
AUD. A, Angell

-Daily-Larry Robbins

left the dogmatist finally doubt-
ing, and Slade at once began to
sing another Butterfield thing,
"I've got a mind to"give up liv-
ing."
It was magical. The two some-
how fit and caused the synaps-
es from ear to eye to goose-
bumps.
Slade did everything well. All
night. But especially he sang
well. I liked his phrasing in
"I've got a mind" even better
than Butterfield's.
land rap
ice winner of the Tomkins Award,

i But tle best was yet to come.
What was lacking in part in
the earlier performances - co-
hesive music and smooth inter-
actions between acting to music
-came together in a remark-
able finale.
Called "On the Rack," it was a
composite of Slade written

lyrics and a piece from Shake-
speare's "Othello" set to taste-
ful and emphatic music.
Slade sang it, mesmerizing us.
He had remarked earlier that it
was one thing the band hail
carefully rehearsed.
Yeah!

r--

I

The I.C.C. Presents

Black poets to rea

M8i

poets and twi

IKTITAF

Xavier Nicholas describes his poetry as
"giving a beat to my breathing-to the rhythm,
of my life as a Black man in America." This
rhythm in Nicholas' life along with that of three
other Black poets will be presented in a reading
tonight at 8:00 p.m. in the League Snackbar.
Nicholas, who presently writes poetry and
teaches Afro-American history in Detroit will
read frbm several of his works and will parti-
cipate in a discussion on black people, poetry
and his writings.
The Poetry Night presentation, part of the
Creative Arts Festival will also feature Naomi
Long 'Madgett, an educator who has long fought
for the inclusion of black writers in school texts.
In a review of her latest book, Star by Star,
Mrs. Madgett was called "a natural poet-vigor-
ous, inventive, true."'
Dudley Randall, the dean of Detroit's black

will read several poems based on "the disturbed
feelings and the violent events of our disturbed
and violent times."
Randall founded the Broadside Press, which
publishes individually designed "broadsides" of
single poems by Black poets. His work has been
translated into three languages and some of it
has been set to music.
Ahmed Alhamisi has been described as a
spiritual poet-artist, aquarian, and vegitarian.
Among his literary works are blacks SPIRITUAL
GoDs and & on this night.
Currently on the editorial staff of several
black poetry magazines, Alhamisi is also writing
an autobiographical novel.
Although the focus of the evening will be on
the black poets, students are encouraged to read
their own poetry: Admission is free.

=m m m,

i A free film Series on
THE RELIGIONS OF MAN
A National Educational Television Film series prepared under the direction
of HUSTON SMITH, Professor of Philosophy, M.I.T., author of RELIGIONS
OF MAN (available in paperback)

m

w

,

TONIGHT & EVERY WEDNESDAY
A HOOT
come do your thing
and sing-a-long

1421 Hill St.

FOX EASTERN TEATRES
FOX VILLAGE
375 No. MAPLE RD.769-1300
STARTS TODAY
LIMITED ENGAGEMENT

HILL AUDITORIUM

JAN. 28-FEB. 1
Hinduism: Part 2
Hinduism: Part 3

FEB. 4-9
Buddhism: Part 1
Buddhism: Part 2

FRIDAY EVENING, FEB. 7

The above listed films will be shown at the followipg places and times:

Tuesday 7:00
Wednesday 3:30
7:00

South Quad Lounge
Newman Center, 331 Thompson St.
Multipurpose Rm., UGLI

ONE WEEK ONLY

$2.50---$2.00---$1.50
Tickets on sale at Hill Aud.

FREE FOOD

I

SATURDAY-
CUSTER'S LAST BAND
a massacre in progress
ANDY STEIN and BILL HINKLEY
Don't miss this Ann Arbor first

M G M presents
the John Frankenheimer-
Edward Lewis Production of
the fixer
Based on the Pulitzer
Prize- winning novel
by Bernard Malamud.

I

Thursday
Sunday

Box Office, 8 A.M.-5 P.M., Feb. 3-7

7:30 Ecumenical Center,'921 Church St.
5:45 Y.M.C.A., corner 4th Ave. and William

OFICE OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS, 2282 SAB

11

.

i

!
,
,.
,
, f

FIND YOUR
OWN THING

-ji

I

I

k
/"

f/f ,,
! / { fi'( .
'\ __ ~ j
(1 i'
1VK ,<.-

3
t
. f ; ,

on the

DAILY
BUSINESS
STAFF
see JANE or SUE
at 420 Maynard
___ - -___- - _ _

presents

THE ALVIN AILEY

Metrocolot

MON.-FRI. 7:00-9:20
SAT.-SUN. 1:45-4:15-6:50-9:0

1,

I

AMERICAN DANCE THEATRE

III

II

SUMMER INSTITUTE IN ISRAEL

JUNE-AUGUST, 1969

11

I

ANN ARBOR PREMIERE THURSDAY
Mad Marvin Presents at the Vth Forum
Thurs., Fri., Sat., Sun.-11:00 P.M., Separate Admission
ANDY WARHOL'S
"THE CHELSEA GIRLS"
(with dual projection)

. to tour the country with a complete program of sightseeing and enter-
universities-
THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY, JERUSALEM
BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY, TEL AVIV
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF HAIFA
This program will last approximately eight weeks, divided into six weeks of
study and two weeks of touring. The University of Michigan will grant up to
six semester hours of credit to those admitted to the Institute, provided, of
course, that they meet the academic standards.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 8:30
in Hill Auditorium

I

IN COOPERATION WITH THE CREATIVE ARTS FESTIVAL

II

T14F COST 1S X960_ and includes: I 1

11

TU ' ~4QA ~ ;r~~.I II I

11

-.,L

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