Word: toni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CRITICS HAVE accurately called Toni a neo-realist film eleven years ahead of its time. In a decade of pictures made in studios, it as shot entirely on location in the Midi, using local inhabitants as well as professional actors. I feels completely true to the environment and lives of immigrant French peasants. As Richard Roud puts it, "Renoir's ambition was that the public should imagine that an invisible camera had filmed various phases of a Crime passionel without the human beings involved in the action having noticed...
...Toni begins with a group of immigrant entering a southern French village, and follows them through a few years of work, marriage, estrangement, friendship, death--all the processes of their lives. The setting is strongly established in the first shots (in a train); and its importance, in the characters' conversations and in the shooting style, is maintained throughout. In outdoor scenes the characters are integrated into the landscape, made part of the natural pattern. These shots of the land have a geometrical quality of which the figures are only one element...
...quality. But such unity is not schematic. You couldn't draw a map of the countryside: where is the railroad station in relation to the mine, or to Marie's house, or to the lake? Even within single sequences the shots are discontinuous: when Marie tries to drown herself, Toni running through the weeds trying to find her could be hundred miles away. This setting is not something documented but something created. You can feel its strength but not organize it into a plan. The land is unified because all of the shots have the same tremendous evocative power, because...
Still, the festival has always performed a valuable service in offering certain films that were either too flawed or too offbeat for commercial distribution. The program directors' taste in revivals remains impeccable. Jean Renoir's Toni, made in 1934, is a gentle, loving tribute to the peasants of pre-Civil War Spain. The uncut version of Max Ophuls' Lola Montes (1955), never commercially released in the U.S., is one of the most sumptuous romances ever filmed. Among the other festival highlights...
...Whole Bit. But many couples insist that they do belong in the same world. Says San Francisco Negro Drama Student Toni Johns, 20: "I feel proud that I can date white boys, that my companion can do it, that we have no hang-ups, that we have enough sense and our heads are in the right place." And when it is a case of true love, the reaction can be fiery. Says Seattle Negro Musician Ernie Hatfield, 18, of his white fiancee: "We're not trying to prove anything. We love each other, that...