The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

Several fascinating, contradictory facts stand out in the 1965 New York film scene. First, film is ‘in,’ with a vengeance. This most modem of all the arts, long designated an ‘entertainment’ by foe and friend alike, has finally been discovered: its popularity with the cultural elite and the young enthusiasts is rapidly assuming the proportions of a cult. The most important revelation of the first two New York Film Festivals has been the massive emergence of this new, predominantly young audience, passionate, opinionated, vociferous.

Two, film is about to join Twentieth Century art. With most of the serious contemporary directors, realism and the simple narrative cinema are on their way out. The artists and poets, to the usual consternation of the usually consternated, are invading the medium, seducing the financiers with their Arabian fantasies and. as is their wont, playing havoc with long-established, not-so-eternal truths. How else explain the growing pre-eminence in the commercial cinema of experimental works in a variety of styles: semi-surrealist, neo-dadaist, existentialist, absurd, improvised films such as A Hard Day’s Night, The Silence, What’s New, Pussycat?, The Knack, 8½, Woman in the Dunes, The Red Desert, The Trial, Dr. Strangelove, Alphaville, Help, Before the Revolution, Repulsion, Mickey One. These spiritual children of L’Avventura, Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, testify to a stylistic, thematic, technological, ideological liberation of film from Nineteenth Century art. Realistic narrative structures, clearly defined plots and characters are increasingly displaced by visual ambiguity, poetic complexity, restless improvisation; the editing is explosive, elliptic, unpredictable; camera movements are frequent, free, fluid; time and space are telescoped or destroyed; memory, reality and illusion are fused until, in a flash of frightful revelation, we realize that the totality of these uncertainties and discontinuities reflects nothing less than the modem worldview in philosophy (existentialism), physics (relativity, indeterminacy, quantum theory), psychology (the subconscious, myth, the dream world as a place). And so film finally breaks with its sordid provincialism and inevitably becomes affected by modern theatre (Beckett, lonesco, Artaud. Brecht), new literature (Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman) and the contemporary plastic arts.

Three, New Yorkers are seeing ever less of serious international cinema. TV inroads, mounting costs, new exhibition patterns, insufficient critical support are seriously limiting art film exhibition (except for Sophia Loren and luscious sex films). Thus, the New York Festival becomes steadily more essential as a witness and catalyst. Unencumbered by box office considerations, it focuses and reflects international trends by presenting a cross-section, not of the largest and most commercial, but of the most interesting films of the year, reinforcing their analysis by symposia with leaders in film and in the other arts. It shows new trends as they occur rather than a year too late or never; offers new works by the masters and introduces classics never or not for decades seen in America. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it brings to the fore as yet unknown new directors: elegant hints to the adventurous, just as in previous years it introduced Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes), Polanski (Knife in the Water), Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano), Owen (Nobody Waved Good-bye), Losey (The Servant), Roemer (Nothing But a Man). It is on this exalted and adventurous plane that the Festival, each year, perpetrates both its errors and, hopefully, its triumphs.

© Amos Vogel/Lincoln Center 1965
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