Abstract

Film Festival II

The article presents information on the New York film festival, held from September 10-20, 1970. The testimony offered by most of the pictures shown at the film festival bears witness to sorry conditions in Great Britain, France, West Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain and Brazil. In "Street Scenes 1970," a documentary filmed as a project of New York Cinetracts Collective, one watches the hardhats brutally beating up student anti-war demonstrators; what is almost as bad, one must suffer the ignorance and stupidity of nearly all the persons involved. The films now coming from the, Hollywood studios--"Getting Straight," "Diary of a Mad Housewife," and the like--and often hailed by reviewers as tremendously important, reveal how much slackness, of judgment, sloppiness of feeling and fundamental conventionality is to be found in both the makers and publicists of these films.