Not worth mentioning

Here are two films that I can’t recommend you see, and there is no chance you’re thinking about seeing, unless you are a directorial completist such as myself.

With films such as Battle of Culloden and Edvard Munch, Peter Watkins was established for me as a director to watch, so when I saw his latest had been released on dvd, I moved La Commune (Paris, 1871) to the top of my Netflix queue. Despite its six-hour length, I thought it was something I might wind up showing at the Clark during some Impressionist show. But this was no Best of Youth, where the hours speed by in a pageant of beauty and passion -- frankly it was a chore to sit through despite its obvious merit, and I fast-forwarded through the second disk (still able to read the subtitles.) Watkins assembled a group of 200 actors, and commandeered an abandoned factory to create sets of several streets of the 11th arrondisement. Over a period of weeks, the actors researched their characters and the revolutionary events of 1871, and then staged reenactments into which the camera plunged as a participant. The layers of reality are transparent and permeable, the actors speak in character and out, on historical fact and contemporary relevance, and the medium is the message to the extent that most of the action is covered by male and female reporters in period dress for Commune TV, while the other side is seen by news commentators on the official Versailles TV. There’s a good deal going on, but Watkins does nothing to speed up the process, allowing lots of repetition and then slowing things down even more with explanatory title cards instead of voice-over narration. Still you get a palpable sensation of revolutionary fever building, with a strong feeling of “You Are There” (for those old enough to remember the Walter Cronkite series from the ’50s.) At half the length, this might have been a great film, or it might have been a truncated record of a great experience, who knows?

I have no recollection of what led me to put In Celebration (1974) on my Netflix queue; it took years to filter to the top of that list of 200+ films. It must have been the idea that it was a Lindsay Anderson film I had not seen. But it was less a film than a modestly opened-out record of a stage production of a David Storey play -- very much a late product of England’s Angry Young Men, sort of “Long Night’s Journey into Day” meets “Who’s Afraid of John Osborne?” Three sons return to their old home in a Yorkshire mining town to celebrate their parents’ 40th anniversary. Family history is dredged up, dysfunction is revealed behind a brittle facade, you know the drill. Alan Bates is excellent but not quite right for the eldest son who wants to unearth grievance and turn everything over. A startlingly young Brian Cox is the tormentedly silent youngest brother. The middle brother is a successful businessman who wants to make everything okay for his parents, while suppressing his apparent homosexuality. The father has spent nigh on fifty years down in the mines, mainly to hide from the chilly woman who married down and whose main concern is to maintain “human hygiene” in a dirty world. It was all interestingly familiar to me (the mother strikingly like my English grandmother), enough to make me go back and finish it after it had put me to sleep the first time through.