FILM
- AS A -
SUBVERSIVE ART

PIGPEN aka PIGSTY
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, France/Italy, 1969)  (F)
The contemplation of death.  In one episode of Pasolini's
most personal and most controversial film, Clementi plays a
savage during the Middle Ages, reduced to cannibalism by
hunger in some deserted, possibly war-torn landscape. Caught,
he is tied to a stake and eaten in turn by scavenging animals.  SC

THE ULTIMATE SECRET:
DEATH

Although in a fit of metaphysical paradox contemporary science
acknowledges the boundary between life and non-life to be fluid,
the periodic transformation of matter from one state into another
continues to evoke all the superstitious alarms and taboos of pre-
history.  For primitive man believed death to be neither normal nor
inevitable, but rather caused by the breaking of a taboo, sorcery,
or the revenge  of the dead; and since it was a source of pollution,
the dying, the dead, and those who handled them had therefore
to be isolated.  Clothing, houses, and household objects were to be
destroyed and, according to Fraser, even burial grounds were taboo.

While it is clear that these prohibitions and fears remain in varying
degrees part of our subconscious, we tend to overlook their origin
in superstition.  The corpse is still considered contagious to such an
extent that not merely its actual presence, but even its fictional
portrayal sets off profound anxiety; for it disrupts the pattern of
normal life, subverting the illusion of eternity and order on which
our existence is built, and all the reassurances of power, wealth,
and ideology with which we attempt to hold nothingness at bay.

That the commercial cinema either avoids death or romanticizes
it is therefore not surprising.  The insufferable sentimentality and
the manageable, antiseptic way in which people die in commercial
films (Love Story for example) once again reveals this kind of
cinema to be an important purveyor of Establishment values.
For the smooth functioning of technological society requires the
excommunication of all disruptive elements (criminals, madmen,
corpses) in the quickest, most secretive manner possible.

What is more significant, however, is that the documentary
filmmakers -- those intrepid realists, having roamed the globe
twice over for material -- carefully neglect this area.  Although
they have already documented large areas of human activity
and visited all the forbidden places with their lightweight
cameras and portable sound, their curiosity, with hardly an
exception, has stopped short of death, funeral parlors,
morgues, or morticians with their ointments, tools, and
injections.  That this entire area -- more universal by far
than others covered ad nauseum -- simply does not exist
in contemporary cinema, reveals taboo in its purest form.

This is why there are so few film records of individuals dying
of natural causes; it is rather war deaths or executions that
have been caught on film.  Even these are rarely shown except
on ceremonial occasions at which an audience gathers in
guilt, remorse, or solemn, ineffectual vows never to forget.

The cinematic image -- the meticulous reproduction of whatever
is before the camera -- has a way of looking "real" even if fictional;
how much more powerful its impact is when portraying a true event.
It is our unconscious perception of the gap between actuality and
invention that gives the accidentally filmed knife murder of the black
spectator in the Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter such tremendous
power.  For when we witness unstaged, real death in the cinema, we
are frightened, caught in the sweet and deadly trap of the voyeur;
mixed feelings of attraction and repulsion take hold of us as
we anxiously watch the actual end of another being and search
his face for hints of the mystery or proper rules of conduct.

The Nazis, pursuing their dreams of super-human perfection,
banished death from their films altogether, hiding concentration
camp corpses,  war casualties, and civilian victims even better
than the Americans  were to hide their victims in Vietnam.
Film footage of the latter exists in  profusion, but dead soldiers
or civilians are seldom seen on American television.  Even more
significantly, America prohibited the showing of US government film
records of what happened to the populations of Hiroshima and Naga-
saki; such is the power and fear of death even over its perpetrators.

The reaction to the use of these bombs again makes it clear that
our technology far outstrips our capacity for outrage or empathy.
 We are capable of feeling one death or even several (and of
making these stand symbolically for more); but once confronted
with casualty figures of war and other of man's "civilizing" missions,
we "tune out".  This indifference to large numbers (one million
Vietnamese ... six million Jews ... ten million Pakistanis) becomes
more pronounced when the corpses belong to "underdeveloped"
races. We react more strongly to white students killed at Kent State
than to black students killed at some (which?) Southern college;
to  twelve clearly identified Israelis killed in Munich rather than
to fifty unknown Arabs killed in retaliation; and since in any case
we have "difficulty" distinguishing one Asiatic from another, we can
bear the deaths in Hiroshima or Vietnam with greater equanimity.

This same poverty-stricken imagination -- so convenient in times of
stress -- compels us to sympathize far more with those about to die
than those  already dead; it is apparently too difficult for the living
to identify with a corpse.  Our sensitivity and sophistication prompts
to erect elaborate mechanisms for censoring pictorial representation
of acts that we commit  instead of concentrating our efforts on their
elimination; it is never the image that goes too far but always reality.

The calculated omission of death has not been lost on the subversives of
cinema.  They have begun to invade this last stronghold of primitive taboo,
dragging from their graves the victims of warfare, torture, state persuasion,
new weaponry, and extermination camps in order to compel us either to
look at these horrors or to eradicate them.  And in beginning to record and
comment on "normal" death as well, these same subversives attempt to
project a more humanist acceptance of its mystery by subsuming it into
the mystery of life.  Said Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his The First Circle:

There is no immortality and therefore
death is not an evil; it simply does not
concern us; while we exist, there is no
death, and when death comes, we are gone.

The concentration camp universe, 30 years later, has variously
become a cliche of mass culture (referred to by that most
offensive of alienating terms, "the holocaust"), been elevated to
a profound moral problem,  or pushed into the subconscious as an
unbelievable episode, however true, of no relevance to our times.

While the Nazis were in power, the very topic of the camps
was taboo, although hinted at in intentionally vague internal
propaganda. No film records made by enemies of the regime
within the camps survive, nore were any documentaries made
by the Nazis for public consumption (except for the two films
described in the chapter on concentration camps); but there ex-
ists in the archives horrifying footage shot by guards or officials.

Since the fall of the regime, a band of stubborn film subversives in
several countries have, from time to time, attempted to recall the
horror (Resnais called his concentration camp film "an essay in hu-
man forgetfulness") and to re-establish a link between our "rational"
world and this by now mythological event.  They have done this
by dispassionate documentation of actual evidence, artistic trans-
mutation of the material, or by the recreation of an "atmosphere".

The subversion of the concentration camp lies in its absolute denial
of bourgeois normalcy, its ultimate abolition of rationalism.  In
the enormity of this one event, many have found the death of
God,  the end of history, the destruction of the myth of man.

Thirty years later, one's only quarrel with the philosophers is that
they turned to hopelessness too soon; for since then, we have for the
first time witnessed the utilization of atomic weapons against humanity
and the destruction of entire countries, both in the name of peace.

FILMS
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THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972)
A mysterious hand, a white cloth, and a table edge, a fly
walks calmly on the sole of a foot, undisturbed. A powerful
visual metaphor from the first film to deal with morgue
and autopsy, recorded in poetic documentary style by a
noted avant-gardist.  Here life and death are inextricable
as medical personnel and corpses mingle in close contact.  SC
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Inevitably, it is an avant-garde filmmaker who confronts us for
the first time with morgue and autopsy room.  This is an appalling,
haunting work of great purity and truth.  It dispassionately records
whatever transpires in front of the lens; bodies sliced length-wise,
organs removed, skulls and scalp cut open with electric tools, blood
drawn; a fly that walks on the sole of a foot, undisturbed.   There are
timeless images: the hands, closed forever upon themselves, the dead
eyes, the deft and simple opening of a body's surface, the empty ab-
dominal  cage (a hole at the bottom leading to the outside), suddenly
poignant clothes (the unexpectedly final attire of murder or acci-
dent victims), a penis (at last at peace) attached to an open, gaping
body.  Life and death are inextricable here, as doctors and orderlies
(never clearly seen) mingle with and manipulate the inert flesh,
dead  and live hands often touching its strong close-ups.  After
every  act of  carnage, the merciful white sheet descends on the
remains, a symbolic gesture reinforced in series of quick, haunting
fades.  Then the camera follows (in tracking shots and rapid cuts)
a surrealist procession of dimly-lit heaps -- at times still red
with blood -- on stretchers and under shrouds, receding into
the  distance along bleak corridors under greenish lights.

A great desire "to see clearly" informs the work -- the film's title
derives from the Greek meaning of the term "autopsy" -- a refusal
to sentimentalize or to avert one's glance; yet the "objective" film-
maker continuously breaks through to compassion and horrified
wonder in his selection of shots, angles, and filmic continuity.

With almost the entire film photographed in close-up or medium
shot and utter silence, form and content are for once perfectly
blended to create a subversive work that changes our consciousness.

This final demystification of man -- an unforgettable reminder
of  our physicality, fragility, mortality -- robs us of metaphysics
only to  reintroduce it on another level; for the more physical
we are seen to be, the more marvelous becomes the mystery.
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THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972)
The doctor's hand nonchalantly digs into a chest cavity
to look for a bullet, as his arm rests on the body's exposed
organs.  The texture and thickness of skin and fat reveals
just how far away we are from our insides.  To accept
this taboo shot means to accept one's physicality and to
reject any metaphysical concept of the human body.  SC
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THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972)
Two impersonal, professional hands coolly at
work on a mysterious object; a man's exposed
skull, about to be removed, while his scalp has
been pushed forward to cover all of his face except
his chin.  Particularly upsetting are the surgical drill
and the up-turned scalp; direct attacks on the viewer.  SC
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THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1972)
The eye of death.  The open eye of a corpse,
caught and framed in a breathtaking, lin-
gering shot by a master filmmaker.  It looks
upwards, unblinkingly, and inexplicable gra-
dations of light and shadow.  This is the end.  SC

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THE ATOM STRIKES
(Army Pictorial Service, US Signal Corps
for War Department, USA, 1950)
The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their
aftereffects are among the most widely photographed
and most thoroughly suppressed events in history.
 While hundreds of thousands of feet were shot by sci-
entific, military, and medical personnel, most of this
material remains secreted in official archives. Sig-
nificantly, this first official record (released only on a
restricted basis)  is confined to structural damage, and
completely omits  visual evidence of human casualties.  The
initially routine interview with a survivor (a Jesuit priest,
also described in John Hersey's book) becomes a horrifying
reliving of the event when he recounts the actual bombing.

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BIRTH AND DEATH
(Arthur and Evelyn Barron, USA, 1968)  (F)
This cinema-verite-style documentary interweaves
the pregnancy and childbirth of a young woman
with the lingering death of a cancer patient to
comment on the celebration and tragedy of existence.
The tenderness and intimacy of the young couple,
and the mystery of birth are contrasted with the
dignity of a man who faces his death without deception.

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THE BLOOD OF THE BEASTS
(LE SANG DES BETES)
(Georges Franju, France, 1949)
When the butcher raises his axe-like tool to
stun the animal, the camera stays with him
until the bitter end; there is no attempt either
to protect or cheat the spectator; we must
come to terms with daily slaughter, committed
(not only in slaughterhouses) in our name.
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This documentary on the slaughterhouses of Paris is one of
the great masterpieces of subversive cinema; here, for once,
we are face to face with death, and are neither protected nor
cheated.  Unlike Hollywood films, when the butcher raises
the hammer to stun the horse there is no "cutting away";  the
camera, objectively and cruelly, stays with the event, making
us its shocked accomplices.  As these "killers without hate",
knee-deep in blood and surrounded by steaming excrema and
vomit, murder animals in cold indifference before the camera --
the number of animals dying but a fraction of a day's output
of slaughterhouses everywhere -- we learn to see, and then
perhaps to feel what we have not felt before. Violence here
is neither fictional nor titillating; it is massive and real.

A dream-like quality permeates the intense realism of the
images; a surrealist intent -- akin to Bunuel's slitting of the eye-
ball in Un Chien Andalou -- is discernable in this anti-bourgeois
film.   But  the eyeball, however shocking, was fictional; The Blood
of the Beasts is real.  Forcing us to view another being's painful and
sordid death in all its detailed enormity, it subverts our natural state
of consciousness and opens us to greater insight. Franju, committed
artist, resistance fighter, moralist,  wants us to consider all slaughter
anywhere committed on our  behalf by those we hire to do our dirty
work, so that we can sit  down at clean tablecloths and deny complicity.
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THE BLOOD OF THE BEASTS
(LE SANG DES BETES)
(Georges Franju, France, 1949)
Amidst steaming blood and men wading in excrement, even
Vietnam and the concentration camps are not too far away.
The killing of animals in Paris slaughterhouses becomes, in
this masterpiece, a poetic metaphor of the human condition.
 Its unflinching realism and ice-cold brutality --depicting
what "killers without hate" (Baudelaire) do to animals
daily at our behest -- carries its own surreal impact, which
compels those willing to watch to enter into new awareness.

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DEATH DAY
(Visuals:  Sergei Eisenstein, Mexico, 1934)
The enormous amont of film shot by Eisenstein in Mexico  for
his ill-fated Que Viva Mexico was never edited or completed.
 However it provided footage for works edited by others, of
which this is one. Death Day is a record of a curious Mexican
holiday, a cross between Memorial Day  and Halloween, taken
from the Aztec feast for the dead.   For one day, death rules
supreme  in the form of candy skulls, death toys, processions
of skeletons, and funereal masks; yet it also seems strangely,
almost benevolently, integrated into life, the fear
of it weakened by mockery and familiarity.

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DIABOLIQUE
(LES DIABOLIQUES)
(Henri-Georges Clouziot, France, 1955)  (F)
One of the most frightening and shocking films ever made, Diabolique
is notable for its particularly effective exploitation of our fear of the
dead and their return.  For its diabolic timing, sadistic heightening
of tension, and meticulous shock-montage are merely stations on
the way to the ultimate horror:  the return to life, before the breaking
eyes of the murderess, of the "drowned" victim of her deed, gruesomely
emerging from a filled bathtub, and in a further turn of the screw,
his apparent removal of his own "eyes".  Since only a small portion
of the film's length consists of frightening images, it is clear that
Clouziot succeeds in evoking the "nameless dread" of our atavistic past.

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THE END OF ONE
(Paul Kocela, USA, 1971)
These alien, prehistoric monster birds --
caught in a powerful, dynamic composition
of blacks and whites -- are merely close-ups
of seagulls, but photographed from their view-
point. One dies a slow, lonely death on a beach,
recorded by the filmmaker with utmost gravity.
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A documentary of a dying seagull, alone on a beach.
She falls for the last time, turns her head sideways
and we see her eyes.  There is no sound except nature.
Time passes.  Her eyes glaze over as we watch them.
A being has died; a filmmaker has made us care.

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FORBIDDEN BULLFIGHT
(CORRIDA INTERDITE)
(Denyus Columb de Daunant)
This lyrical, dreamlike masterpiece of the visual
cinema -- entirely based on documentary footage --
creates its hallucinatory effects through that simple
and perhaps most effective of all filmic devices; slow
motion.  One of the few films to convey the mystique
of the corrida in emotional rather than intellectual
terms, it proceeds entirely in choreographed, majestic
images, and never fails to remind us of impending
death; when it comes, the driving home of the
sword is repeated in twelve langorous dissolves
in a beautiful, ominous cascade of images.

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DEATH IN VENICE
(Luschino Visconti, Italy, 1971)
The chalk-white face, in ironic contrast with newly-dyed mous-
tache and hair (for youthful looks), denotes the death of
the  famous writer on the Lido, his unrequited homosexual
passion for a young boy now forever unfulfillable. Sun and
sweat make the hair dye run down his face in tragic rivulets.  SC

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FORBIDDEN GAMES
(JEUX INDERDITS)
(Rene Clement, France, 1952)  (F)
Very few films are capable of portraying the secret worlds
of children; this is achieved here in the context of a story
of war and death.  Set in France during the Second World
War, it deals with a five-year-old girl orphan and an older
boy who, ironically, can retain normalcy only by recreating
images and episodes of a death so familiar as to be integrated
into their universe.  Building secret burial grounds for animals,
they engage in rites and fashion a macabre alternate reality open
only to them.  The psychological penetration of the mind of the
child is consummate; and death, in its many guises, never absent.

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GERM AND CHEMICAL WARFARE
(CBS News, USA, 1968)
A documentary look at the chemical and biological weapons
developed and stored by the US, including nerve gases,
chemical disorienting and disabling agents, defoliants,
crop-killers, plague, anthrax, and botulism carriers.  The
film asks why the US remains the only major power which
has not ratified the 1925 Geneva Treaty against chemical and
bacteriological warfare. There is an odor of massive death.

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INTERVIEWS WITH MY LAI VETERANS
(Joseph Strick, USA, 1971)
This deeply disturbing cinema-verite study consists
of uncensored interviews with American veterans
of the My Lai massacres.  It is a film about death --
and how somebody's death can be caused, faced
and then talked about by the assassin. Clean-cut
young Americans, now back in civilian life, recount
with defensive smiles, false indifference, and concealed
remorse, how and why they murdered.  Disassociated
from their acts, destroyed by war, dead in life, alien
to guilt, they emerge as victims as well as executioners.
Their artless straightforwardness convinces us immedi-
ately of the veracity of their horrifying self-indictment.
The fact that their statements are accepted as truth
is what creates the shattering, seditious effect of
this film and separates it from the propaganda.

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THE CREMATOR
(Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1968)
A mystifying, therefore arresting image.  An open coffin,
with an undoubted corpse; a young man, as if dead,
next to it; and, most disturbing of all, a stream of
water -- the only action, hence, focal point of the still;
only later do we notice the hand holding the nozzle,
a terrifying sight, since its invisible (and implicated)
owner offers no help but merely rinses what we
now realize to be blood from the young man's body.

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IT IS GOOD TO LIVE
(Fumio Kamei, Japan, 1958)
This is one of the first documentary films about
the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It coldly
records the lingering effects of the bomb on the
victims decades later.  In a succession of realistic,
shocking sequences, their lives, difficulties, and came-
raderie are examined.  The very objective of incidents,
scenes, and faces makes the film the more terrifying.

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MEDITATION ON THE END OF HUMAN LIFE
(POSLEDNI VECI CLOVEKA)
(Jovan Kubicek, Czechoslavakia, 1967)
A very original student film from Prague's famed film
school, made during the period of liberalization. This
clear-eyed study of funeral services and crematoria
reflects on how mass production methods and the im-
personality of technological society have invaded even
this last ritual.  An accelerated sequence condenses
the endless repititions of identical funeral services,
the arrivals and departures of mourners, into a few
moments of sad comment.  Though crematoria in the
East are fast, popular, and clean, the director points to
the even more efficient ones of Terecin and Hiroshima.

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A MOVIE
(Bruce Conner, USA, 1958)
One of the most original works of the inter-
national film avant-garde, this is a pessimistic
comedy of the human condition, consisting of
executions, catastophes, mishaps, accidents,
and stubborn feats of ridiculous daring, magic-
ally compiled from jungle movies, calendar
art, Academy leaders, cowboy films, cartoons,
documentaries, and newsreels.  None of the
visual material is original; and none is used for
its original purpose.  Amidst initial amusement
and seeming confusion, an increasingly dark
social statement emerges which profoundly
disturbs us on a subconscious level.

Particularly important are the documentary
images of death; the battered bodies of Mussolini
and his mistress, suspended upside down; the
crash of a waterplane, with the pilot hitting
against the fuselage in a brief, terrifying moment;
a one-second documentary shot of an execution,
"revealed" as if it was a dirty secret, and just as
quickly withdrawn; the death of a bridge (wildly
swaying, then collapsing), immediately following
an optimistic speech by Teddy Roosevelt.  The
entire film is a hymn to creative montage.

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FLY
(Yoko Ono, Great Britain, 1970)
An ominous and deceptive shot; the girl is heavily
drugged, not dead, but the presence of flies busily infesting
all parts of her body sets off an inevitable chain of morbid
associations. The graniness of the image further contributes to
this impression; it is as if the body was already decomposing.  SC

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NECROLOGY
(Standish Lawder, USA, 1969)
Minimal cinema in the service of a non-verbal, apoca-
lyptic statement:  a stationary camera trained on an
escalator  crowded with blank, motionless, introverted
people -- endless victims -- ascending (backwards!)
in  unbroken, heart-rending succession, to heaven,
hell,  or oblivion.  Original and disturbing.

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WINTERSOLDIER
(Winterfilm Collective, USA, 1972)
"It was like a hunting trip".  A further example of America's
civilizing role in Vietnam, showing the hunter and his trophy.
The smile, the stance, the contemptuous posing of executioner
astride the victim he has "bagged", are still visible in this indis-
tinct photograph which thereby already symbolizes (for those
with short memories) the slow receding of the crime into history.
 But the task of the subversives is to tear open old wounds.
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This feature-length documentary of the historic, terrifying
testimony given by more than 200 ex-GIs at the 1971 Detroit
Winter Soldier Investigation concerning American atrocities
in Vietnam renders academic any disputes as to the relative
effectiveness of word as against image.  There is simply no
substitute for seeing the faces of the men as they testify:
their strain, tears, and hesitations, all inexorable guarantors
of veracity, none available from a reading of the testimony.

One after another, these veterans of crime recount their ex-
periences in acts of accusation and expiation; the testimony
of these long-haired, intense young men implicates them as
well; and judicious intercutting of old photographs showing
them in crewcut and uniform further solidifies this theme
and broadens it to one potentially encompassing all of us,
given only our presence at the right time and place.

Authenticity and horror are built with small, precise
details.  An American officer advises his men not to
count prisoners at the beginning of their removal
in American planes, only upon arrival.  A woman
is split open from vagina to neck.  A small child
is stoned to death for taunting the Americans.

The effect of the testimonials is enhanced by intercutting
of color slides and live footage of tortures, killings, burnings,
bombings -- images otherwise hidden away by the hundreds and
thousands of feet in film libraries of television networks and
never seen.   They show pitiful, enormously frightened, totally
disoriented human beings, delicate and small in build, violated
and murdered by massive, huge Westerners who seem to look like
men from outer space, dropped by evil machines to rain  destruction
on their ancestral lands.  All the "cliches" are there -- the crying
mother displaying a maimed child, the aged grandparents herded
off, the civilians crouching in unbelievable fear in bulrushes, in-
effectively hiding from helicopters in which one of the monsters
actually films their plight.  One feels frightened at the thought
of untold thousands of others patiently waiting in television
vaults to be stirred into pitiful life by future researchers, an
accusing army  of corpses that we will never surmount.

Far from being a horror show or propagandistic exercise,
however, the film, by the very enormity of what it portrays,
becomes a philosophical set-piece, raising all the basic
moral issues; the mechanisms by which "ordinary"
people become torturers and killers, the inability to
feel the suffering of others, the possible inevitability of
violence and murder in human affairs, the capability
of all-encompassing evil on the part of everybody.  It
postulates self-protection, the need to maintain per-
sonal sanity, the urge for revenge, as premises for total
indifference toward the "enemy", and asks unvoiced,
insistent questions as to the irreversible damage
this war has already done to American civilization.

The great and ultimate stars of the film are the tears shed by men
who have learned that to destroy the false machismo instilled by
school, state, and army, it is necessary to learn how to cry. Through
the depth of their tearful misery, openly expressed, they reveal the
true essence of a masculinity which, for the first time, is human.

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THE RACE
(William Copland, Australia, 1970)
In this angry newsreel compilation of injustice
against the oppressed there occurs, without any
particular preparation, a most shocking documentary
sequence:  the meticulously detailed, on-camera killing
of a captured prisoner -- possibly in the course of the
Congo "action" -- who, cringing on the ground, has just
been promised life.  Since the "outcome" is unknown
to either him or us, we "share" -- in the comfort of a
movie theatre -- his unbearable dread, and attempt
to believe, as does he, the promises and taunts of
his captors.  A tiny part of our humanity, perhaps,
dies with this unknown man -- one nameless victim out
of thousands dying somewhere at any given moment.

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REFLECTION
(ZRCADLENI)
(Evald Schorm, Czechoslavakia, 1965)
A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a
philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst com-
plex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resigna-
tion of the patients. Existentialist rather than  optimist, the
 approach is one of humanistic atheism,  accepting death as
part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their
outlook;  all speak of death as a fact, without either senti-
mentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the
film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionalism.

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THE LOVED ONE
(Tony Richardson, Great Britain, 1965)
Perhaps only a "foreigner" could so elegantly have
exposed and debunked America's high-camp burial
establishments, their financial greed, hypocrisy and
fake religiosity.  In a very American attempt at banishing
death, the mortuary literally assumes the trappings of a
beauty salon, an ominous union of Eros and Thanatos.  SC

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RITE OF LOVE AND DEATH
(Yukio Mishima, Japan, 1965)
The distinguished Japanese novelist who committed hara-kiri
in 1970 as a protest against the corruption of national ideals
uncannily anticipated this in a film he wrote, directed, and
starred in five years earlier, in which he enacts the same
traditional samurai suicide by which he later took his life.
Based on his short story, "Patriotism", it deals with a histori-
cal incident of the 1930s, in which an officer in the elite guard
is asked by the Emperor to execute a number of his peers
after an attempted coup d'etat.  Faced with the traditional
samurai conflict of divided loyalties -- to Emperor and to
fellows-in-arms -- the officer maintains his honor in the only
way possible for him:  hara-kiri.  His detailed, bloody suicide
is one of the most gruesome and convincing examples of fic-
tional death in cinema.  Acted by Mishima himself, its ferocity
is the more frightening in view of what actually transpired later.

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SIRIUS REMEMBERED
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1959)
The face of death; a daring, silent poem on a dead and
gradually decaying dog, compusively recalled in inter-
related, dream-like episodes, from many angles and in
many seasons. The handheld camera, in its distraught
movements, reflects the filmmaker's anguish.  A homage.

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TO LIVE
(VIVRE)
(Carlos Vilardebo, France, 1960?)
The eternal victims.  This compassionate compilation of
authentic documentary materials of the last 20 years -- without
a single staged scene -- shows the endless suffering,  torture,
and death of civilians, war victims, natives, peasants,  people
all over the world, in images of unforgettable power and directness.
 Just think -- admonishes an introductory title -- scenes such as these
are probably taking place once again somewhere at this very moment.

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THE TWILIGHT OF THE DAMNED
(L'AUBE DES DAMNES)
(Ahmed Rachedi, Algeria, 1970)  (F)
This excellent feature-length documentary --
the story of the imperialists colonization of
Africa -- is a film about death.  Its most shocking
sequences derive from the captured French film
archives in Algeria containing -- unbelievably --
masses of French-shot documentary footage
of their tortures, massacres and executions of
Algerians.  The real death of children, passers-by,
resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes
unbearable.  Rather than by blatant propaganda,
the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence,
constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

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VIETNAM, LAND OF FIRE
(No credits available, France, 1966)
The ferocious reality of the suffering, torture,
and death imposed on the civilian population
of Vietnam by America, as seen in newsreel
and documentary materials; children with
terrible wounds, bodies being cut open (on
camera); the effects of napalm and poisonous
chemicals, corpses burnt to a crisp, victims
without limbs, villages set on fire --
and Vietnamese resistance.

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WHEN LOVE FALLS
episode in LOVE AND THE CITY
(Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1953)
In one of Antonioni's earliest films -- an episode in Zavattini's
ove in the City -- he interviews survivors of suicide attempts
who then re-enact them in the actual locales.  An example
of Zavattini's insistence on "actuality" and non-fiction
as the stuff of drama and consciousness-raising.

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THE WAR GAME
(Peter Watkins, Great Britain, 1965)
A terrifying "fabricated" documentary records the horrors
of a future atomic war in the most painstaking, sickening
detail.  Photographed in London, it shows the flash burns
and firestorms, the impossibility of defense, the destruction
of all life.  Produced for the BBC, the film was promptly
banned and became world-famous and rarely seen.  SC

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DEATH BY HANGING
(Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1968)  (F)
Death by hanging:  fictional.  The strongly geometric division
of this still into two separate components (causing a peep-hole
effect) and its powerful contrast between black and white rivet
attention on the pitiful and involuntary gesture of the condemned
man, entirely surrounded by efficient, cold-blooded automatons.

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ORDINARY FASCISM
(Mikhail Romm, USSR, 1965)
Death by hanging:  real.  An efficient and solicitous
German officer strings up a young civilian in the East.
Another, a girl, has already died, her eyes uncomprehen-
ding.  The young man's slight smile may be due to shock.
The recording of real death is always traumatic for the viewer.