Documentary as Art

Despite Harry Reasoner's discontent with the unbroken, hour-long documentary, the format is hardly in danger of falling into disuse. On one night alone next week ABC will pre-empt its entire schedule, including Peyton Place and Big Valley, for a compote of four documentaries. The network will open its evening with No. 5 in Jacques Yves Cousteau's series of hymns to the sea. To Love a Child, a study of adoption's triumphs and travails, will follow. Kitty Le Champion will show the skier involved in snowless pursuits. As it happens, the last of the evening's documentaries should be first.

Cosmopolis is John Secondari's attempt to assay the urban crisis, and it is so successful that it manages to transform TV journalism into art. Editing shots of teeming Tokyo and sprawling Los Angeles so that they follow one another with a kind of rhythm, the producer-writer-narrator never lets his visiting experts stay on camera too long. Instead, Secondari uses the visual part of his program to show what the architects' voices are talking about. There after, he juxtaposes imaginative plans for cities of the future with the rot now growing at the cities' hearts. The combination is disturbing, although Secondari has done his best to make it hopeful as well as ominous.

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