Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only a one-joke film, salesman, like so much of direct cinema, is a one-short film. Now while we have no right, given the style and the technical different relationships, there is no excuse for spending half of our viewing time in close-medium one0short, mainly contemplating Paul Brennan's dejected visage. The best documentary camera work (Ricky Leacock, sometimes) is distinguished by its description of the whole in the detail, the capturing on hands in Leacock's Mothers day, for instance). Salsman, despite almost mythic possibilities (an existence trapped in motels with their cleaning women; ion rented cars...
...moneychangers of the cloth, about a ruling class' interest in the institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti's insipid " Christ Climbed Down" ("from his bare tree/this year/and ran away to where /no intrepid Bible salesman/covered the territory/in two-tone cadillacs...
...great [July 11]! But when it hits you in the eye with belted monotony on the screen, in books, on the stage under the pretentious guise of the "new morality" (i.e., dressed-up smut) I find it quite tiresome. There's nothing funnier than a good dirty joke, and nothing flatter than a poor one. Seems to me, the plethora of poor ones going the rounds these days is all one hears. Who's laughing...
...Southern blacks who were protesting the Administration's new school-desegregation guidelines. Though Mitchell's image as the Administration's heavy may prove hard to live down, he may be somewhat miscast in the part. Some of his colleagues even claim that he can crack a joke and a smile-from time to time...
Perhaps the freshest play is Ptakovina, by Milan Kundera, who is one of those fighting to keep the writers' union committed to the liberalization program of 1968. Kundera's novel of Czech Stalinism, The Joke, has the directness of a fist in the face; it has been made into a film shown at Cannes this year. Ptakovina is a made-up word, literally "Birdtrick," meaning stupidity...