Word: reals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PETER WATKINS made a film a few years ago called The War Game, about what happens when a nuclear bomb is dropped on England. Watkins wanted to create something real for his audience that they had never experienced before. It was a blatantly anti-war film: if only people could realize how horrible even "tactical" nuclear weapons can be, then even talking about them would be obscene, building them unthinkable. To make the film as shocking as possible, Watkins decided to make it look like a television documentary. An off-camera interviewer is asking radiation victims, "Well...
...have Faces, which is a film by John Cassavetes about upper-middle class America. Again, the idea is to make something that we would never see--or, in this case, never notice too well--real for us. Again, Cassavetes uses this phony cinema verite. But it is cinema verite without the verite, only the trappings of a spontaneous film: the pictures are grainy, the sound is very poor, the actors talk over each other's lines, the camera is made to seem like a spy or an intruder...
...movie, we feel like voyeurs, guilty, but we are are not voyeurs. In Faces, this kind of phoniness becomes obvious after a while, and we are ambivalent about what we are watching. All we can say at first is, "Why, isn't that Cassavetes clever! It looks so real!" But the reasons it looks so real are its technical sloppiness, its planned spontaneity (which might work if we could not see through it eventually), and its mundane subject...
...This is about Faces after all, so he keeps flashing close-ups of faces on the screen, quickly, back and forth. Sure, it is shocking. The same as seeing an oversize knee jerking out at you. Cassavetes has discovered something about film: you can make it look bigger than real life...
...real meaning of the grace-period decision depends on one key question: whether Finch's momentary retreat is a hint of weaker stands to come. Both Thurmond in his satisfaction and the Journal in its anguish have worked from the common assumption that it is. So have many Southern schoolmen, who now imagine that the desegregation plans they finally conjure up won't have to be too rigorous to meet Nixon administration standards...