Volume 12, Number 6 · March 27, 1969
Wild Raspberries
By Margot Hentoff
Faces
directed by John Cassavetes, produced by Maurice McEndree
Salesman
a film by Albert Maysles, by David Maysles, photographed by Albert Maysles, edited by David Maysles, edited by Charlotte Zwerin. produced by the Maysles Brothers
Shame
directed by Ingmar Bergman. produced by A.B. Svensk Filmindustri
We are not all movie lovers, those of us who as children in the war-time Forties spent our Saturday afternoons in movie houses. We went because there was nothing else to do, because everyone went, and because it was dark, dirty, and liberating inside. We were a wild audience, hardly spectators at all; our childhood moviegoing had more to do with the theater of participation than the cinema we know now. Reading the names of those New York West Side theaters which serve our literature as bridges to the common generational unconscious, I think not of the screen but of that great Elizabethan pit, the children's section, where the fists and food and insults flying made the movie necessarily incidental; the aisles down which the matrons chased us as we escaped into forbidden sections to smoke, find perverts in every row, throw candy from the balcony, chant—even on occasion to run across the stage so that it was the shadows of our images which, flashing between the projector and the screen, blotted out the faces of the stars.
Review, 2146 words
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