TOO DEEP INTO MOVIES

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33728, 28 December 1974, Page 9

TOO DEEP INTO MOVIES

Sexual Alienation in the Cinema. By Raymond Durgnat. Studio Vista. 320 pp. Any true film lover has an inbred suspicion of books about films, deeper than that any true lover of books has of literary criticism. Reviews which help the film-goer to decide which films, of the vast numbers which are released each year, are worth seeing are just tolerable. But full-length books which attempt to “interpret” films are, as often as not, impediments rather than aids. Films are for watching, not reading about. When a book about films like “Sexual Alienation in the Cinema” is written in prose so dense that it often defies the best effort of the reader to discover what is being said, it becomes even more useless. The constant reference to other films, books and fields of study, typical of the super-sophisticated pretension of some North American

academic communities, becomes even more tiresome when it appears m print. There is no need to quarrel with the basic assumption of "Sexual Alienain the Cinema.” Films are more than entertainment; they do provide insights into people’s lives and illuminate the "collective subconscious," particularly because of the ease with w'hich sexual or erotic fantasies can be depicted But the attempt to make explicit what is implicit in the films themselves comes to seem silly after a few turgid pages. The book is far more useful for the stills, liberally distributed through the text, than for the text itself. For the New Zealand reader or filmgoer the book is of even less use than it might be to fijmgoers overseas. The misplaced solicitude of the censor and the lack of imagination of the distributors will no doubt conspire to ensure that manv of the films discussed are not screened in New Zealand for years to ,come.