A conflict

AMONG the current film fare offered in the West End, titles such as 'Swinging Swoppers, 'The Wife Swappers, 'Mondo Sex', to name but three, together with the second-time arounders, many of them good films, but filling merely the gaps left by the fall in film production as recession bites, Joseph Losey's 'Figures in a Landscape' stands out with all the authority and dignity of a genuine creative artist.

His work has always borne that stamp, and w lether you like it or not, and often I find it ponderous and irritatingly incomplete, you are always aware of a worrying or disturbing quality that serious art has, aware of a mind that is restless and inquiring.

The very way he uses a camera compels you to look afresh, to go beyond merely the surface visual impression and experience the complexities and interrelationships of things.

In 'Figures in a Landscape' he has found a form and image that compresses all his earlier obsessions into one central The title itself has a directness and simplicity, a bareness that announces the hypothesis that men conflict with eạch other to survive.

We know almost nothing about the two men, whose hands are tied behind their backs, running through a parched and bleached landscape.

They are clearly on the run, but from whom and where, we do not know. The young man is exhausted from hae brutal insistence by the older man that he carries harangues is physical, with the instinctive cunning of an animal.

He leads the way, directs the route.

He knows fresh about because Can mell it'. He seems attuned t escape and survival, practised, protessional. In contrast the boy is merely a useless weight around his neck.

Yet they need each other, Inese the pposites are indispensable to each other, simple lact ale bould need bonds. What they both need is IMPORTANT READING REA NEW PARK POBLICATIONS STALINISM IN BRITAIN ANALYSIS Available from New Park Publica 186a Clapham High St., SW4. Price 24s (soft) 41s 6d (cloth) pos! FILMS a knife for their release.

They come upon a herd of goats and an old peasant who is their keeper.

I need you for this,' says the older man, but the young man refuses, horror struck. Alone the older man murders the herdsman, but in vain.

He has nothing on him, no knife or cutting instrument that they need so badly. It is a senseless brutal act, committed without thought, and the young man accuses the older for his stupidity and thoughtlessness.

It is the first time that the young man has asserted himself in any way, asserted himself as a thinker.

Thé herdsman, who had nothing, is now a corpse that signposts their passing. The older man needed the younger man in a way different from what he first supposed. The ropes round their wrists feel even tighter. They try to cut them on the rocks but without success.

Swooping from the sky, directly over their heads, comes a helicopter. It turns and swoops down at them, DING MacConnachie (ROBERT SHAW) attempt to destroy the enemy. Right:

Accompanied by Ansell (MALCOLM McDOWELL), he flees from the helicopter. like some huge machine hawk. The two pilots are faceless shapes in helmets and flying suits.

It plays with them almost, diving at them, twisting, turning: They try to run away but it pursues them like a giant horse fly with blood on its mind.

The older man shouts abuse at it, trying to challenge it.

When it finally leaves them alone and hovers watchfully in the air a hundred yards ahead, the older man shouts If I hadn't been tied, I could have pulled it down out of the air'.

He is outraged at the violaFor him it becomes a personal vendetta; to get the pilot.

The younger man says: 'We would do better to wait till darkness and then travel quickly. Find a village and a knife'.

At night the helicopter wheels away and the two men find a village. There they enter a house where a corpse is laid out for a funeral. They find a razor and free themselves of their ropes.

Then they help themselves to clothes, tinned food and a gun with ammunition. It is at this point they notice the griefstricken widow of the deceased in a trance that blocks out their presence and their intrusion.

It is only when the older man takes bread from the corpse that she is aware of them and lets out a piercing cry.

Again they have to escape and again the young man accuses the older of stupidity.

But the older man has other things on his mind. He is determined to go it alone, to take the gun and share the food and make it to the mountains. The young man wants to come with him but the older refuses. He sets off.

Yet when he is faced with a can of food, he doesn't know how to open it and only the directed young man has the tin opener and the knowledge to use it. The young man bargains technique for protection. They leave together.

This relationship of opposites is the key and centre of the film. They are polarized as youth and age, as new and old, as force and weakness, as stupidity and intelligence, as ignorance and knowledge, yet they are inseparable.

That inter-relationship is the key to their survival, their interdependence their weapon against the enemy who hunts them throughout the film in the infernal machine and later with the massed troops of an army. in a Landscape' showing at the Carlton in London The relationship between the two men changes, develops, now one dominates, then the other, but it is in their struggle to survive that the differences and the unity are revealed.

Driven by the enemy they make for the mountain tops, to the snow, where, according to the older man, they 'will be all right'.

The route involves them in a battle in a plantation with the enemy trying to flush them out with fire.

(This episode is a filmic tour de force, which highlights the blind, wordless, bloody confusion of war, of refugees, of senseless devastations, of loss and cruelty.)

Yet where are they making for? The older man confesses that he doesn't know, that he's never been there before, but has a blind faith that it will be all right when they get And once high up, there is a feeling of safety, as if they have made it. The snow is pure, untouched by man, virgin territory.

The young man runs in it, makes snowballs, washes his face.

They are tired and scared, but they have arrived. Below the enemy is still after them, but the frontier is a few yards It is here that a despair creeps into the film, a despair that has been totally absent from the characters' material struggle. Already the unknown is tainted by the known. At BY BRIAN MOORE the frontier the sinister of another army stand.

The young man approaches them. They say. nothing.. He has a gun in his hand. The soldiers point their weapons at him. He throws down his gun and advances.

The soldiers relax. Part of the bargain of entry is to go disarmed.

Yet the older man cannot give up his obsession. He must have his revenge. He must destroy the helicopter.

Alone he battles it out with it... and is hacked to pieces by its bullets.

The film ends on a long slow aerial shot over the miniature figures in the snow. There is no indication at all of what is on the other side of the mountain.

It's unclear what Losey means by this. Does he mean that there is no real victory over the machine, that it will always win?

Or that past revenges have no longer a present significance?

Or that all struggle is doomea, yet we have to I don't think Losey is certain. What I do think is that he has tried to impose an idealist resolution to a very materialist film, which can have no resolution, for struggle is a continuous process.

The uncertainty that .he raises and retreats from fought out on the other side of the mountain in a higher form. openly against the Black thers.

As justification for this they offer a formal repetition of the general case of Marxism against methods of individual acts of terror, together with a con-