Festivalities

Pity the city so itty and bitty that it has no film festival. Berlin's 15th was n June; Venice's 26th ended two weeks ago; Rio de Janeiro is cranking up for its first; New York's third just closed its doors.

Alphaville was New York's opener. One of the ten movies French Director Jean-Luc Godard has managed to make before the age of 35, it won the top prize at Berlin--the Golden Bear. At Lincoln Center it seemed that a Golden Boar would have been more appropriate. So absorbed is Godard with his razzle-dazzle camera work, inside jokes, and technique of making up a movie as he goes along that he commits the bore's besetting and inevitable sin of endless repetition--under the delusion that his audience is having as much fun as he is.

The film's period is the future; its genus, science fiction. With a secret-agent raincoat and a face like a well eroded cliff, U.S. Actor Eddie Constantine, who specializes in playing American tough guys in French thrillers, is checking in at a hotel in Alphaville, capital of some distant galaxy. He says he is a reporter from Figaro-Pravda, but he is really Outer-World Agent Lemmy Caution (his name in a popular French gangster series) on assignment to destroy Alphaville's boss computer, Alpha 60, and its inventor, Dr. Von Braun.

A bellgirl shows Lemmy to his room and in robotlike manner takes off most of her clothes. She is an official Seductress, she says, and she is about to take a bath with him. He slaps her around a bit ("I can find my own broads") and sets about contacting a fellow agent (Akim Tamiroff). Expiring in the arms of another Seductress, Tamiroff gasps that Lemmy must make Alpha 60 destroy itself. To this end Lemmy takes up with Von Braun's daughter Natacha (Anna Karina). Casually killing his way through the glassy, nocturnal city, which has such place names as Heisenberg Avenue and Mathematics Park, he quickly exhausts his vein of satire and Alphaville begins to go preachy.

Godard insists, suggests, bleats, hints, reiterates, elaborates, declares and whispers that the machine is dehumanizing man--a message that seems somewhat familiar. All he offers for relief from this sermon is cinematic hark-backs to other movies, presumably entertaining to I-can-remember-more-movies-than-you cognoscenti. From time to time the optic nerves are assaulted by glaring lights, sudden switches to film-negative images, and frames of pop art irrelevance spliced into the action. It is such a long way to the final fade, in which Natacha masters the forbidden word-- "love," naturally--that moviegoers may feel they have been numbed by one of Alphaville's own devices for eliminating undesirables: a theater where audiences are electrocuted in their seats.

The Shop on High Street, made last year by Czechoslovakian Co-Directors Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, took festivalgoers in New York back to the year 1942, when the Jews of a little Slovakian town incredulously learned that Hitler's pogrom had begun. Shop starts as a warm and well played village comedy. Tono Brtko (Josef Kroner) is a simple and straightforward carpenter in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who hates his brother-in-law, the local Gauleiter, but accepts a supposedly lucrative plum from him--appointment as "Aryan manager" and ideological overseer of a Jewish button shop.

The shop's aged proprietor, Polish Actress Ida Kaminska, cannot comprehend Tono's function and assumes that he has been sent by the kindly government to be her assistant. She needs help; instead of being a rich source of profit, the shop consists of a few dozen empty button boxes, and only Jewish charity keeps it going. A deep affection grows up between the little carpenter and the woman--with which the movie begins to grow less funny. The climax comes with a roundup of Jews for the concentration camps. Should Tono risk hiding his friend or force her to join the frightened crowd in the square? The end is a moving, ironic illumination of the small-scale greed and failure of nerve that enabled the Nazis to triumph over so many free men.

Film, written by Samuel Beckett, played both the Venice and New York fests. It is a stark, black-and-white portrait of an old man who awaits death in a small, lonely room. Seeking absolute solitude, he turns out his cat and dog, closes the curtains, covers the parrot cage and goldfish bowl with his coat, and blacks out the room's only mirror. Finally, he destroys the last reference to the world in which he has lived, a packet of old photographs. But he cannot escape himself, and as he lifts his eyes to the barren wall before him, he comes face to face with the image of his own deadpan likeness, with a patch over one blind eye. Except for that moment of revelation, the actor's face is never seen; he plays the rest of the 22-minute film with his back to the camera, relying on his narrow shoulders, dragging feet and sensitive hands to express his total desolation.

The startling but quite predictable reason that Film scores is its sole actor: Buster Keaton, 68, who was known to generations of silent-filmgoers as the funny man who never smiled. And Keaton is the movie's toughest critic. "I don't know what the picture's about," he complains. "It's so goddam arty I'm surprised the audience didn't walk out."

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