Word: roemer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Both organizations are aimed at create student interest in good films and making movies. But during the past 18 years they have produced only one successful full length, movie, "Touch of the feces, "produced by Michael Roemer '49; the ten minute short, "Le Courbousier America," by Johnson; and a fewer attempts which were either never unshed or never shown...
Film spoke directly to his own experience; it rendered the speed and randomness with which things happen to modern men: "You pick up the phone in your office and hear that somebody has died." Films, lacking the conventional devices of the theatre, have to deal with what Roemer calls "this contiguity of unrelated affects." Nothing But A Man, for instance, switches without warning from inside to outside, from a home to a factory, from one city to another. "I had not though of my life as heroic, at least in any classical sense. But film made me aware...
...Roemer and Young's Harvard movie, A Touch of the Times, was a sort of individualism. The hero inspires mankind to go outside and fly kites. This was the pilot venture of Ivy Films, a full-length movie which took two years and $2300 to make. Roemer reflects that "the ambitiousness of the enterprise gives it what little life it has." He had to replace the starring actor five times because his cast kept graduating or going on probation during those two years...
...Although Roemer insists that the film had a very silly theme, a hint of the same idealism appears in the ending of Nothing But A Man. Roemer says candidly, "Art is in a very deep sense an idealization of life--trying to get not only at the way things are but at the way they should...
...call Roemer's film, then, a "slice of life" is entirely insufficient. His desire to make invented stories seem like real life, to create complete belief in a screen illusion, is unsophisticated by comparison with the symbolic exertions of some modern moviemakers. But Roemer did not arrive at this idea, or realize his current film, by proceeding from the obvious. "Ingenuous as I may seem," he said last week, "I am not ingenuous...