REALER THAN REAL FILMS

film we are told the crew never mixed with the family, but merely recorded their relationship discreetly as it were from the side lines.

One thing to know about a film crew and their equipment di stret their cameram in rely cameraman an Arriflex on his shoulder, moving about room, changing lenses, reloading film, is not easily assimilated into the everyday life of a normal drawing room, any more than the lights, microphones and recording equipment.

However small the crew, they constitute a minor invasion.

lo say, therefore, that the lo not mix with the family is to deny the family's consciousness of their presence, for the relationship between camera and subject is a two-way process a camera is concealed and the subject is totally unaware i its presence you get a ver sion I actualit Once the consciousness of a camera enters you get a version of that consciousness. No role In a feature film, the director interposes himself, directs his actors, draws performance out of them, stresses what he wants to stress and uses the self-conscious skills of the performer but in •Married Couple' he can play no such role for slave to actuality. If he is engineering situations, then course there is no 'actuality'.

So what you end up with is film-maker family colluding with the in demonstrating their self-conscious idea •of their own relationship, which is, of necessity, false.

Rather than play out the actuality of their relationships, they transform themselves into actors playing themselves, and bad ones at that.

They ham about, provoke each other, move from row to row. That may. well be the content of their marriage, but the film form falsifies it. Paracorned with being ators: conBorne out In fact the story of the way this film was made bares this out.

The director found a couple who had just broken up. They came back together to make the film and in the making of it more or less returned to each other, only with one significant change. They now saw themselves as movie stars.

In watching the film you feel you know less about them at the end than when it started, and furthermore you don't care. It's one dull repetitive note and level that their performance set.

There are no insights offered into their relationship, or any psychological understanding of why they act in the way that they do. Only at one point in the film does something emerge raW nerve ends of their relationship.

He asserts his role of breadwinner and provider and therefore his needs must have priority; she screams back that he treats her as a slave.

It is the only moment when the film has a life of its own and raises itself above the limitations of their self-conscious performances. But it is a small compensation for the tediousness of the whole production.

It amounts to merely a random selection of theatrical impressions. It takes the surface at face value and leaves it at that.

Where a real work of the imagination offers insights into reality, it tries to discover the essence of experience and to deepen the understanding either emotionally, or socially, or psychologically or all of these.

Catalogue

It heightens our comprehension of life.

Merely reproducing experience is not an understanding of it. A catalogue of events is merely a catalogue of events, unless the interconnections and interrelations of these events are fought for and understood in a conscious way. That's what determines equally a work of art.

For a 'Married Couple to masquerade as actuality is the worst kind of fraudulence.

It says these are real people, therefore it must be real. For a marriage to be breaking up bringing with it all the tensions, gullts, pain and anxiety, the least you could have expected was for one of the partners to turn to the screen and say, 'Get that goddam camera out of here'. all ts of imphailitated i Bet all thése after Stalin's death] such as Gomulka in Poland, Husak and Smrkovsky showing themselves now as frenzied enemies of communism and revolution' typim statist a male ar victims of Stalinist justice who later capitulated to serve the bureaucracy, and one of its most courageous and outspoken opponents.

The Albanian brand of Stalinist fundamentalism defies analysis. It perhaps can be best likened to a sun-worshipper attacking a Jesuit for selling out to new. fangled monotheism.

Poland's workers have no intention of returning to the grim days of Stalin's barbaric rule.

They remember that it was Stalin who wound up the Polish Communist Party in 1938 and had its exiled leaders murdered in Moscow!

They also remember with equal bitterness how stalin joined with Hitler to partition Poland at the start of the Second World War.

ago to fount