![]() At least, we conclude it is heroin although it could of course be cocaine-it is a white powder and the two men sniff it. The business on which Wyatt and Billy have crossed to Mexico is the purchase of heroin. Easy Rider represents an unusually direct statement on the part of its authors: there are no paid “stars” to intervene between them and us, no interposition of an alien personality or will. It is of some importance, I think, that Fonda and Hopper are the leading actors in a film which they wrote together, with some unspecified assistance from Terry Southern, and which Hopper directed. Both the young men are long-haired, one of them bearded, and both wear clothes which, like their style of hair, at once authenticate their dedication to freedom. Easy Rider opens with its two main characters, Wyatt, played by Peter Fonda, and Biilly, played by Dennis Hopper, having crossed the border from California into Mexico to do business with a Mexican peasant. Its notable achievement lies in its ability to communicate states of feeling: it is through its skill in the creation of emotion and mood that it does its work of persuasion.Īn air of purposive mystification, a sense of the existence of tensions which are perhaps made the more significant by never being named, is established from the start of the film. Its method is that of implication and suggestion rather than that of assertion. Although it is highly tendentious, it wears the mask of disengagement its atmosphere, in fact, is that of a pastoral. A revolutionary movie can show how the arms struggle may be done.” Easy Rider is not at all a film of this order. I do not mean overt pedagogy, and I do not even mean what the famous director Jean-Luc Godard presumably had in mind when he was speaking at Harvard recently about his film See You at Mao, and said, “The movie is like a blackboard. But perhaps I should first say what I mean by instruction in this context. It is as an exemplification of this power of moral and social instruction that I wish to discuss Easy Rider. Indeed, I have only a most formal hesitation in borrowing his authority for the opinion that no art now exerts more moral influence than the films, and that for the present generation, and particularly among our best-educated young people, more than personal character is being formed by our film-makers: a culture, a society, even a polity. There can be no question that were Shaw addressing himself to present-day affairs he would put the film under quite as strict scrutiny as the stage, or even stricter, and not merely because the movies reach so much wider an audience than stage plays but also because he would be bound to respond to the special force of the visual as compared to the predominantly verbal medium. For if it is the purpose of the theater to instruct us in character and conscience, then clearly all men of character and conscience, all persons devoted to the public good, should be informed of the way in which the theater is discharging, or might discharge, this important duty. ![]() Certainly it is some such appreciation of the high moral function of the theater that warrants our appeals for government support of the stage and makes the basis of our contempt for the philistine and commercial theater.Īnd his statement of the high purpose of the dramatic art makes plain why Shaw found it appropriate to talk about Ibsen to a group of people whose first commitment was to political and social improvement. We nevertheless recognize that Shaw is voicing a conviction which in transmuted form is still very much alive for us. “Art,” Shaw wrote, but he was speaking primarily of the theater, “should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficiality and vulgarity.” A formulation like this was possible eighty years ago as it of course no longer is today, its language must seem to verge on quaintness. Shaw’s justification for bringing the theater into discussion with people chiefly engaged in government, politics, economics, and the law was his belief that the drama has a significant influence upon the individual life and the life of society. ![]() Bernard Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism was first presented in 1892 as a lecture to the Fabian Society in London.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |