Word: colorful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Black Sunday, a national bestseller by Thomas Harris (Putnam; $7.95), supposes an attempt to obliterate a Super Bowl football game (hurrah!) along with (alas!) both teams, the TV play-by-play and color men, beer vendors, pigeons, Pinkertons and some 100,000 spectators, including the President of the U.S. The sociopath who plans this provocation is not an Arab but a defecting American named Lander, who went sour while serving time as a P.O.W. in North Viet Nam. Now he pilots the advertising blimp that floats (aha!) above every important football contest. To get all the plastic explosive he needs...
...lapse into romanticism and self-indulgence which threatens to mar the film's authenticity, however, is avoided by the stark contrast of the black and white sequences. The intercutting of past as color and present as black and white functions as a sort of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the action in order to make him consider its implications. The black and white sequences, both in form and content, pose the question of the occupation's meaning for Frenchmen today. The dull crowds of people, the dark buildings, the depressing film studio--mundane scenes from the present--undercut...
...needless Michel incessantly about his "bourgeois" life style as they drive to the frontier. Just before they reach the border. Michel stops the car next to a field and walks off, announcing that he is going to search for his past. At this point, the action cuts into the color film, which concludes with the escape of Michel and his family from the Germans to safety in Switzerland. When Michel returns to the car, the student is gone and the credits follow, without Michel's coming to any conclusion about the relationship of his childhood to his present life...
...rhetoric is simplistic and his behavior infurlatingly self-righteous--yet the director suggests that his resistance to the French police today is somehow analogous to his resistance to Vichy. Nevertheless, though his understanding of this connection is unsatisfying, Drach has found an effective formal means--the intercutting of color and black-and-white sequences--of handling the difficulties involved in recreating personal experiences of the occupation without lapsing into solipsism and emotional overkill. Les Violons du Bal asks the right questions; while it never fully answers them, it is nevertheless a more penetrating portrait of the occupation than Black Thursday...
...sentiments on the war are clear, and he has fought it since 1967 in the best way he knows--educating Americans. Still, he has carefully guarded against letting his politics color his academic work. "I think it would be wrong to be a propagandist," he explains. "In this case, I think the facts are very eloquent. In any case, I think it's the function of an educator to let people judge for themselves. I don't think you can pre-fabricate a judgment. It will be damaging to your point of view. On the other hand...