Book contents
- Frontmattre
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- National Cinema: Re-Definitions and New Directions
- Auteurs and Art Cinemas: Modernism and Self- Reference, Installation Art and Autobiography
- Europe-Hollywood-Europe
- Central Europe LookingWest
- Europe Haunted by History and Empire
- Border-Crossings: Filmmaking without a Passport
- Conclusion
- European Cinema: A Brief Bibliography
- List of Sources and Places of First Publication
- Index
- Index of Film Titles / Subjects
- Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between [1972]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2021
- Frontmattre
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- National Cinema: Re-Definitions and New Directions
- Auteurs and Art Cinemas: Modernism and Self- Reference, Installation Art and Autobiography
- Europe-Hollywood-Europe
- Central Europe LookingWest
- Europe Haunted by History and Empire
- Border-Crossings: Filmmaking without a Passport
- Conclusion
- European Cinema: A Brief Bibliography
- List of Sources and Places of First Publication
- Index
- Index of Film Titles / Subjects
- Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
Summary
Leo Colston, a middle-aged Englishman, played by Michael Redgrave, returns to a Norfolk country estate, recalling the events of a summer, when he was barely in his teens. Young Leo (Dominic Guard) keenly observes the intrigues among the adults in the household, most of whom seem oblivious to his presence, except for Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie), the fiancée of a supercilious aristocrat, on whom she cheats with the farm hand Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Leo is infatuated with both, and they, aware of his burning curiosity, enlist the boy as their go-between, with tragic consequences. As the story unfolds we come to understand why Leo has never married, and just what psychological damage the illicit passion, the secrecy, a child's trust and the adults’ casual use of that trust has inflicted on Leo's life.
THE GO-BETWEEN won the Palme d’Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.Losey, in a good many of his works, likes to draw the lesson that spontaneity is often not the exercise of freedom, but simply the sign of ignorance about the true emotional and social determinants of our lives. Films like M, TIME WITHOUT PITY, BLIND DATE OR KING AND COUNTRY are concerned with the way a man unwittingly, and yet in retrospect necessarily, entangles himself in different social and private worlds which seem at first to have nothing to do with him, but nonetheless fatally exhaust his strength or destroy his life. Throughout his work, furthermore, Losey has been interested in the worlds within worlds, and his later films trace the properly ideological fabric into which a subjective intelligence is woven. Inevitably, once aware of itself between these worlds, this intelligence experiences life as exile.
From the opening shot, with Colston's voice-over saying “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” THE GO-BETWEEN (as the title suggests) makes the coexistence of different worlds and the sense of being exiled its dominant theme. The ostensible subject – taken from the L.P. Hartley novel – is the loss of spontaneity and innocence through an act of adult selfishness.
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- Information
- European CinemaFace to Face with Hollywood, pp. 412 - 419Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2005