Living and Partly Living

Extract

The sixth London Film Festival was held as usual in the National Film Theatre at the end of last October, but on a wet day it looked and felt more like the Western Front in 1916 than the South Bank in 1962. The demolition around the Royal Festival Hall had to be seen - and heard - to be believed. Nothing, however, could damp or deafen the enthusiasm of the crowds who wished to see the films so briefly available to them; during the fifteen days of the Festival just over twenty-one thousand people paid to see the thirty feature films and fifty shorts presented in the framework of the fortnight, and a full house stayed the whole course of an all-night show on the first Friday. This was a marathon indeed: four feature films - Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Gregoretti’s I Nuovi Angeli and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water - were shown between 11.30 p.m. and 8.15 a.m. the next morning, with intervals for hot soup and other refreshments; one can well beheve they were needed.

Of the films new to me which I was able to see during the festival two stood out head and shoulders above the rest, though I am ready to be persuaded that they might have had close competition from two which I did not catch - Commare Seca and Les Oliviers de la Justice: but my two winners were the Polish Knife in the Water and the Italian II Mare. No one who saw Two Men and a Wardrobe is likely to have forgotten it; this brilliant, imaginative and enigmatic short was made by Roman Polanski as a technical exercize while he was still a student at the Lodz state film school.