Photo by Art Sullivan
Harry Gross and Alice Blanchard help William Cadbury (center) during recent Acme-Bijou film
showing.
Film
on
campus:
an
interview
with
William
Cadbury
Where is film on this campus headed'’ That is the basic question
with which I approached Professor William Cadbury, who teaches the
English Department’s two major film courses. Great Films and Film
as Literature. I thought 1 might get a nice, rich column out of his
thoughts. 1 was wrong I got three.
The interview covered three general areas: film exhibition on
campus, the development of a coherent film studies program, and the
current state of film art itself. This column will deal with the first of
these areas, and the others will be covered at later dates.
We began our talk by looking at the fact that University films
cannot be advertised or announced off campus, due to contractual
restrictions, while theater, sports and music events are announced
regularly, even though they, too. may compete with professional
groups or exhibitions. The treatment of film as a commercial rather
than a cultural enterprise by many film-showing groups on campus as
well as by commercial theaters and distributors makes it even more
difficult to convince administrators and policy-makers that film has a
legitimate place in the artistic life of the University community.
Cadbury proposed an alternative to the present situation, an alter
native which could work to stress the cultural aspects of film over the
commercial:
Cadbury: I myself believe that the only logical solution to the
whole thing is to show movies from a central fund and have every
penny go into the central fund and be used exclusively for the showing
of movies This is the natural economic relationship between movies
and the movie-going public. You can’t do it just on a “free library”
basis because the movies cost too much, so you can’t support them in
that way. Seeing a movie is closer to getting a book out of the library
than it is to going to a dance at the EMU. That’s my belief, because
you're getting long-term cultural understanding, rather than simply
doing something for enjoyment. Seeing a movie and reading a book
seem to me to be virtually indistinguishable.
Dunn: So the commercial function should remain with the
downtown theaters, and it should be a purely non-commercial,
cultural kind of—
Cadbury: Right. As far as the University goes, my belief is that
film showing should be basically a library matter, on the University
campus That is, that there is a history of film, it’s hard for students to
get at, there are lots of people interested in getting at it, and con
sequently those people should be encouraged to show as many films as
they possibly can, organized in as creative and positive a way as
possibly can be done, so as to get film history out there in the world.
Dunn: As long as those films aren’t shown for the purpose of
making money, they are really—
Cadbury: There's very little motive for showing them in some sort
of devious way, or just to be commercially motivated. The motivation
here, then, would be to get the range as broad as you can. You know,
Gosta Berling hasn’t been on the campus ever, because I haven’t done
the Scandinavians, and nobody else is going to lose their shirt on it.
Well, if there were a general fund for movies where all the hundreds of
dollars made cm Yellow Submarine had gone back into the fund, and
were then available, you see, not to support some club or some group,
but rather to support other film-showing outfits, then it would make
perfect sense to bring Gosta Berling. Anybody who wanted to who
said, “It’s been too long since we’ve seen any of those classic Scan
dinavian silent films,” would then say so, and somebody’d apply, and
we could get it. It’s not so simple as I make it sound, of course. There
would be matters of organization and so cm.
Fighting the distributors
Cadbury’s desire for a less commercial approach to film-showing
on campus is also frustrated by the 16mm distributors. Cadbury feels
on the one hand that the distributors are right in raising their
minimum rentals on movies with great current appeal, which can
draw huge crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, since these
distributors “have been widely, widely ripped off over the years by
groups using low rentals coupled with incomplete reports of their
grosses to line their own organizational pockets. On the other hand, the
price rise is affecting even the marginally popular movies that Cad
bury’s classes are interested in for aesthetic reasons.
One solution to this squeeze is to subsidize the class showings, but
the amount of subsidy necessary to make such an idea even worth
discussing is impractical under the University’s present financial
conditions.
Another solution would be to try to increase the awareness of the
distributors toward the aesthetic value of their products, so that they
would discriminate between the merely popular films shown on
Fridays and Saturdays, and the seriously studied films shown to
smaller week-night audiences. When I suggested an official University
boycott of distributors failing to make such distinctions in their rental
policies, Cadbury had the following to say:
“I think that the film distribution business is too big for a single
school to exert much pressure like that. One of my plans, one of my
programs, is in fact to start being more nationally in touch with people
who are doing the same thing, and seeing if we can’t start bringing
general nationwide pressure on these people. Because obviously, the
quality of prints is just abysmal, and you never know what you’re
going to get, and the prices are too high, and when the prices are not
too high you get ripped off. For instance, we showed The Masque of the
Red Death which is a very interesting, and I think visually very
distinguished. 'Roger Corman movie, and about five minutes in I
suddenly realized I’m feeling claustrophobic and visually tied down in
a way which is not part of the theme of this movie. Of course. I realized
then what had happened to me. It was another one of those unan
nounced CinemaScope prints which had simply been scanned, and you
got only two thirds of the screen area which Corman had taken his
pictures of In a movie which almost exclusively rides on its visual
effect, that’s just debilitating. We only paid $27.50 for that movie, so
it’s really a cheapie, and somebody would say, ‘Well, what are you
complaining about’’ Heck, you’ve made a lot of money on this. You get
your 30 people and you’ve got a profit there, to back up all your losses
on the $300 wonders that they charge you.’ And yet, I would rather
have paid $100 and seen the film in'Scope But the current state of
understanding of film is such that the distributors, probably rightly,
don t think that many people would have that preierence they trunk,
and I think they’re correct, that there are two basic sources of an
audience nationwide. They are the audience which wants some culture
and which will go to movies, preferably foreign, preferably recent
(that is, the 1960 s), or very, very old That is, you can get a big
audience for Metropolis, you can get a big audience even for Birth of a
Nation, because they have a historical interest which every klutz
knows about People will go to those movies, they figure, and then tljey
figure that people will go to movies for some sort of special reason—
Y ellow Submarine to see the Beatles, Dracula to see Bela Lugosi, and
also because it’s Dracula and you do it for some sort of campy reason
But the idea that there might be film aesthetics value to a Roger
Corman version of The Masque of the Red Death ..the distributors
don’t think that people see that value, and I think they’re right to think
that people don’t see that value. Nonetheless, the value is there, and
serious film students all know it. Everybody writes in all the journals
perfectly seriously about Roger Corman and his camera work and his
mise-en-scene. How we’re going to break through that kind of thing I
have no idea, but I would think that it would be through national
organizations which did support accurate versions of all the movies.”
Cadbury concluded his remarks in this area by panting to the fact
that there are few films which are profitable enough for distributors to
lavish care on—one example is the current Chaplin series A
retrospective of Fritz Lang’s American films would not be so
profitable, and the result is that only a few bad prints are in cir
culation. Lang’s first color film, Western Union, is only available in
black and white; and his ’Scope film, Moonfleet, is available in one
lone standard format print, since it is looked at as “only a pirate
movie ” It will take widespread acceptance of the auteur theory,
Cadbury argues, before the minor works even of major directors are
treated with the respect they deserve.
How this school will help improve audience awareness of these
problems and the need for their solutions will be discussed in the
second installment of this interview, to be published in this column in
the near future
Coming Soon
What may be Orson Welles’ greatest screen performance gives
the last greasily authentic twitch to his minor classic of nasty
suspense, the 1958 Touch of Evil. The film couples a prophetic version
of 1960 s cinema verite griminess with the desperate darkness of the
film noir of the 1940 s to come up with an “Evil Touch” that is prac
tically too tacti'e Acme-Bijou shows the film next Monday night at 8 in
180 PLC.
TAKE HOME..!
Pierre G. Dunn
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for Thanksgiving
Order before noon Wednesday and take a
pie or any other ice cream home with you.
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