Page Two
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Tuesday, October 6, 1970
Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Tuesday, October 6, 1970
DAILY OFFICIAL
BULLETIN
The Daily Official Bulletin is an
official publication of the Univer-
sity of Michigan. Notices should be
sent in TYPEWRITTEN f o r m to
Room 3528 L. S. A. Bldg., before
2 p.m., of the day preceding pub-
lication and by 2 p.m. Friday for
Saturday and Sunday. Items ap-
pear once only. Student organiza-
tion notices are not accepted for
publication. For more information,
phone 764-9270.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6'
Day Calendar
Physics Seminar: I. Kimel, "S-Wave
Non-leptonic Decays," P&A Colloquium
Rm., 4:15 p.m.
Ann Arbor Film Cooperative: Mickey
One, Aud. A, Angell Hall, 7 and 9:30
p.m. i
ORGANIZATION
NOTICES
Gay Liberation Front, New Members
meeting, 117 N. Thayer No. 4, 8 p.m.,
Wed., Oct. 7.
Central Student Judiciary Hearing.
Thursday, Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m. Engineering
Placement Advisory Committee, et. al.,
v. Students for a Democratic Society,
et. al.
Baratin Coffee Hour. every Thursday.
Next time, Oct. 8, 3-5 p.m., Frieze Bldg.
Room 3050. Open invitation to all peo-
pie interested in French language and
culture.
Program Information 662-6264
Watch
the landlord
get his. ~
Godard's 'Wing from the East'
Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces'
Cinema
Chabrol's 'The Butcher'
*
New
By BRUCE MOCKING
Last of two parts
Bruce Mocking attended the
New York Film Festival this
past September. The first part
of the article, published Sun-
day, included a review of Truf-
faut's "The Wild Child". Re-
views of three other movies fol-
low.
While Truffaut's film impres-
ses me greatly, Goddard's Wind
from the East, shown on the
following night, had exactly the
opposite effect, It's Godard's
most boring, hard-to-follow, and
amateurish film, and that's say-
'ing something. As many as forty
people walked out during the
showing; and the only reason
I stayed was the mercifully
numbing quality of having had
very little sleep the n I g h t
before.
But seeing this, painful as the
experience was, inspired me to
a whole new theory about God-
ard's recent films. Let's face it,
Marxist-Leninist,ideology is bor-
ing; how many people do you
know have read all of D a s
Kapitol? And Revolutionaries,
despite all the romanticism that
surrounds them, are boring, too.
Now obviously Godard, as a
serious revolutionary filmmak-
er, cannot help but made a bor-
ing film. Neat, eh? But there's
more.
Now who goes to see these
films - mostly boring Marxist-
Lenihist revolutionaries, people
with inhumanly long attention
spans. Those few misguided,
non-revolutionary souls w h o
come to see Godard's films end
up either walking out or falling
asleep or falling into a kind of
stupor in which the film bor-
ingly progresses leaving them
e
Joplin found
dead in LA
(Continued from Page 1) I
on stage and fake it. I've got to
let. loose with what's inside."
Born in Port Arthur, Tex., in
1943, Janis Japlin was a rebel at
an early age. She left home at 17,
drifted across the country, taking
odd jobs and occasional college
courses. She came to admire beat-
niks because they "believe things
aren't going to get better and say
the hell with it, stay stoned and
have a good time."
Fame overtook her at the 1967
Monterey Pop Festival. She had
been singing in small clubs in San
Francisco and Los Angeles, de-
veloping a mournful blues style
that harked back to her early
idols, Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbet-
ter and Bessie Smith.
Although she seemed totally ful-
filled as an' artist before the audi-
ence, she admitted that the rest
of her life was wanting.
"The worst thing is the lone-
liness," she told an interviewer
last year. "Somehow you lost all
the old friends. The travel circum-
stances pull them away.
"It's hard to make new ones.
When we're not on stage, we re-
hearse, lay around in bed, check
in and out of motels, watch tele-
vision. It really is lonely. I live for
that one hour on stage. It's full
of feeling. It's more exciting than
you'd expect in a lifetime. It's a
rush, honey."
Wave
to ponder Truffaut sitting in
that box with Catherine De-
neuve.
This power of boredom is ob-
viously very useful to Godard
since it gives him total free-
dom. He could be plotting in de-
tail the overthrow of Pompi-
dou, but what French film cen-
sor has the staying power to
observe it.
Even if one is a Godard ad-
mirer and rejects this theory,
there are still several faults to
be found with Wind from the
East. First of all, Godard ar-
ranged to have the film distri-
buted by New Line Cinema, the
most greedy, bourgeois distri-
butor in the business. Certainly,
there are a number of radical
media groups he could have
turned to; I don't think they
would have turned down the
distribution of a Godard film.
But even if these groups were
not up to the task, there are
a hell of a lot of distributors less
bourgeois than New Line.
And there is a further prob-
lem, (I don't know if this is
directly the fault of Godard or
New Line, but Godard certain-
ly had final responsibility),
namely, that the many long,
speeches in the film are simply
dubbed in over the French, with
the dubbing lagging anywhere
from ten seconds to a minute
behind the original French. God-
ard speaks much in the film
of wedding sound to image as
the goal of the revolutionary
filmmaker. I can't imagine any-
thing more counter-productive
to this goal than this stupid
dubbing system.
Fortunately. that Friday was
salvaged by, a new film by the
young director Bob Rafelson,
Five Easy Pieces. He is not very
well known - his only other
film, Head, starring the Mon-
kees, was a total disaster - but
Five Easy Pieces shows that he
has really learned his stuff.
The film is another in the
series of road pictures and alien-
ated-young-American pictures
that have glutted the market in
the past few years, but it is
head and shoulders above most
of the genre. Easy Rider, despite
all its good qualities (one of
which - Jack Nicholson - ap-
pears here) sought manipulat-
ed, undeserved, responses by
playing up to audience identifi-
cation. Midnight Cowboy, too,
National General Theatres
edicits
despite its fine acting, stooped
to a lot of cheap emotional
tricks.
Five Easy Pieces manages to
avoid this about 90 per cent of
the time, and actually says
something genuine about t h e
alienated youth of today. If
anything, it consciously avoids
throwing out any symbols that
might yield an easy emotional
response.
The protagonist, Jack Nich-
olson, isn't a student, isn't a
hippie, isn't even an ACLU law-
yer. When the film opens, he
is working as a hard hat, setting
up oil wells. His girlfriend, Kar-
en Black, isn't anyone from
Women's Lib; she's just a plain,
gum-chewing waitress. Of course
his family is upper-middle class,
but they clash with, him not be-
cause of politics but simply be-
cause the family has a musical
tradition that he refuses to fol-
low.
The title refers then to five
easy pieces for piano - Cho-
pin etudes (though double-en-
tendre does figure in). When he
plays one of these etudes at the
insistence of his brother's
fiancee and she comments on
how moved she is, he blows up,
"I faked a little Chopin, you
faked a big response." He is un-
able to summon the inner feel-
ing necessary to any really good
musician; he knows this, and
it's the reason he is in con-
flict with his family.
The power of the film lies in
the fact that we perceive this
lack of inner feeling, this in-
ability to really appreciate any-
thing. But Rafelson and Nich-
olson never allow us to become
contemptuous, never allow the
film to become corny. Even
though Jack's alienation is so
deep, so far beyond our own,
and so personal rather than
societal, ' we come to feel for
him. We are compassionate even
when we see him driven to des-
perate acts. In short, the film
reaches us on a level beyond
cheap catharsis.
Jack Nicholson gives an even
DIAL 8-6416
ENDING WEDNESDAY
TONIGHT AT 7 and 9
"A Sincere Film Ob-
viously Made by Someone
Who Wants to Undpr-
stand What's Happening
in Our Colleges."
-Hollywood
Citizen News
)motion
better performance here than
in Easy Rider, if that's possi-
ble. He may indeed be, as Rex
Reed suggested, well one his way'
to becoming America's finest
actor. And Rafelson puts Nich-
olson's talent to good use, pro-
viding a pleasing slickness and
outrageous humor that com-
pliment the powerful acting; he
produces a film that is not on-
ly good but whose commercial
success seems assured, and un-
less I miss my guess Five Easy
Pieces should be the Midnight
Cowboy of 1970. i
Saturday night brought an-
other film from a member of
the New Wave-Claud Chabrol's
The Butcher. Like Truffaut,
Chabrol appeared on stage,
looking for all the world like a
French version of Woody Allen.
He related an anecdote of how
he brought his two children to
see the last day of on-location
shooting. The youngsters were
so taken with the village that
the Chabrol's stayed two extra
days. When they finally left,
they stopped at the first cafe
in the next village only to find
the entire production crew to-
tally soused. (The French do
haves an odd sense of humor,
n'est-ce pas.) n
The Butcher is another Cha-
brol film starring the director's
wife, Stephane Audran. When
someone asked him at his
The Michigan Daily, edited and man-
ager: by students at the University of
Michigan. News phone: 764-0552. Second
Class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Mich-
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s of
Thursday afternoon pre
ference why he always s'
wife Chabrol replied,"
that
and
the
tion.
she is a very good
charming." And th
slightest bit of ex
Audran is the headmis
the elementary school in
French village. Jean
plays a butcher, newly r
to the village after fiftee
in the Army. They esta
relationship that range
the charming (he barge
her class to present her
leg of lamb) ultimately,
tragic. Chabrol carefully:
isters comedy and susp
this awkward relationsh
latter increasing as it m
a final frightening and
confrontation.
especially where this s
is concerned, Chabrol
himself a masterful d
and, if I may say so, th
is every bit as good as. t
of vintage Hitchcock. M
lament - and this is n
brol's fault, quite the o
- is no American dist
has picked it up. For son
son that I have never be
to understand, Chabrol
least known for the New
ecstasy
ss con- directors, though just about
tars his everyone who has seen his films
"I find agrees that he ranks among the
actress very best of them. I only hope
is isn't that, as with Five Easy Pieces,
aggera- this beautiful combination of
slick commercialism with artist-
tress of ic merit will give Chabrol the
a small widespread distribution he de-
Yanne serves.
eturned Which leads to still another
n years problem. The New York Film
blish a Festival is the finest gathering
s from anywhere of new films at one
s in on time in one place; it is the oasis
with a in the film desert. I only wish
to the such deserving films would get
admin- better distribution, instead of
ense to the pieces of crap with which
lip, the we are inundated every week.
oves to To send the Festival on tour,
moving even in abbreviated form, would
require a lot of money. But not
uspense that much - not a hundredth
proves the cost of a bomb like Cleo-
irector, patra. I know this won't hap-
his film pen. It is a tragedy, really, be-
he best cause a festival like this is
ly only something not to be missed by
ot Ch- any real film fan, yet it will be
Opposite missed by just about every film
tributor lover outside of NeW' York. Phil
me rea- Ochs once refered to Elvis Pres-
en able ley as "total ecstasy," That's
is the really what the festival is. Total
w Wave ecstasy for $7 a night.
"""
---
DIAL 5-6290
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