MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

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with the kinds of people he has populated the screen with.
Many of those people weren't actors before Forman started
rolling the camera down in Ken Kesey's neck of the Oregon
woods, and one might easily anticipate such an arrangement
leading to a tension between the tentativeness in the way
nonprofessionals grope for their roles and the director's
attempt to capitalize on their hopefully unpretentious
behavior in front of the camera. To a point, Forman does let
the actors' roughhewnness work towards a more "realistic"
flavoring, much in the same way that Cassavetes, using
nonprofessionals, can coax forth performances that seem
natural and, usually, painful evolutions of dialogue and
emotion. But Forman's frequent use of facial close shots
(comparable to Cassavetes as much as to Bergman) doesn't
just serve to index emotional intensity, nor are those faces
coldly scrutinized as though one side of the screen (or
camera) had nothing to do with the other. Instead, Forman
tends to explore his characters in a way that makes it appear
that the actors are taking a large hand in defining the roles
they play (which in fact they are) while the director eclipses
himself to the extent of encouraging spontaneity and trying
to have the camera pointed in the right direction when
something flickers between the characters.
But it's never quite that simple. Forman's use of a
nonprofessional cast probably does contribute to some of the
unstudied-seeming portrayals. It's the director's efforts,
though, that makes those portrayals an interconnected
whole. Especially in the group therapy sessions where
intercut reactions form an important integrating thread in the
ebb and flow of temper and sympathy, Forman, like
Cassavetes, is particularly concerned with creating a credible
totality of interrelationships from which the camera can pick
and choose the nuanced supporting bit as well as the central
THE MAGIC FLUTE
continued from page 33
film's most delightful achievements: to
have us thinking, by the time it's all
over, that all the seemingly different
shadings of both Bergman's and our
perception finally rotate in the penumbra
of Art. In other guises, maybe
that has been Bergman's "message" all
along. The kingdom, though, is not
self-enclosed this time, as it was in
Cries and Whispers, nor is there that
sometimes uneasily taut polarization
between the stiflingly realistic overtones
and the undercurrents of pure
poetry running through the dialogue of
Scenes from a Marriage. Nor, for that
matter, is there much hint of existential
parlor tricks a la Passion of Anna,
wherein each of the four main characters,
at some point during the movie,
takes a moment to sit back, not as the
character he/she portrays but as the
performer he/she is, and reflect upon
the part's genesis within him-/herself.
The closest Bergman comes to anything
like that in The Magic Flute is
when Erland Josephson's face is momentarily
caught among the members
of the audience that Nykvist's camera
is doing its best to transform into an
expressive visual counterpart of Mozart's
musical overture. There is no real
point to be made. Josephson is simply
there to hear The Magic Flute like the
rest of them. And yet one can't help
but feel a twinge of life-meets-art headiness
at seeing a regular Bergman actor
-and sometime writing collaboratorin
a Bergman movie watching Bergman
make that movie while at the same
time partaking of the emotions and
responses contained within it, and
hopefully extending beyond it, touching
the surface of our own expectations
of art. for during that opening
performance of focal dialogue. With Cassavetes, however, this
actual uncertainty as to what's going to happen next, where
the camera will go now, is tied to a strong feeling of
improvisation that Forman only infrequently tries to bring
off, usually with Nicholson in the immediate vicinity. In one
scene early in the movie it works particularly well. Me-
Murphy has just arrived and has already had a chance to
threaten the subdued ambience of the ward while strolling
around a group of card-playing patients who are trying to
pass a quiet morning. Now he's meeting for the first time
with Dr. Spivey; Spivey starts asking those deceptively
amiable, condescendingly frank questions- "Why do you
think you're here, McMurphy?"-when McMurphy notices a
photograph of the doctor holding a huge chinook salmon by
a chain. McMurphy starts asking questions about it, and the
doctor, perhaps sensing an opening for "communication"
with his patient, follows right along. The whole thing is
slightly ridiculous: McMurphy ends up wondering if they
weighed the chain as well. It works, however, because,
whether it was carefully scripted or not, the halting,
exploratory way in which they run through it makes it seem
freshly and refreshingly improvised, especially in contrast to
some lines that come a moment later during the interview
-lines nudging almost uncomfortably at some kind of Big
Theme about the relativity of madness and violent behavior
("Rocky Marciano knocked out 40 guys and he ain't in jail").
Laid out in such cutely paradoxical terms, the point seems
too easily digestible, again perhaps because it's enclosed
within that point of view-McMurphy's point of view-that
we're sometimes led to accept at face value without closely
examining the less palatable underside of McMurphy's selfdestructive
temperament.
Rick Hermann
sequence of briefly-glimpsed faces
something happens, or should happen,
to us: as we watch an audience listening
to the overture of The Magic Flute,
our act of seeing comprises an overture
in itself. We are struck with the perhaps
obvious but nevertheless suddenly
reaffirmed importance of what it can
mean to people to sit before a work of
art and derive meaning, pleasure, and
sustenance from it. In that sense the
audience in the movie certainly mirrors
the audience in the movie theatre-or
hopefully does so; but the image is not
so much a simple reflection as it is a
distillation and translation of something
we are seeing into something
essentially about what we see. The
people in The Magic Flute's audience
arc not just there, but there radiating
all the variables of complexity, wonder,
and even (maybe especially) innocence
that ought to define what it