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The lay of the land, in the Seventies film, is that there are two types of structure being practiced: dispersal and shallow-boxed space. RAMEAU'S NEPHEW, Mc CABE AND MRS. MILLER, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, BEWARE OF THE HOLY WHORE are films that believe implicitly in the idea of non-solidity, that everything is a mass of energy particles, and the aim, structurally, is a flux -like space to go with the atomized content and the idea of keeping the freshness and energy of a real world within the movie's frame. Inconclusiveness is a big quality in the Seventies: never give the whole picture, the last word. A distinctly different structure and intellectual set used in films as various as in THE REALM OF THE SENSES, KATZELMACHER, NOSTALGIA (the Hollis Frampton film in which a set of awful photos are presented and destroyed on a one-burner hot plate), the various short films of minimalist sculptors and painters - is to present a shallow stage with the ritualized, low-population image squared to the edges of the frame. Facing a fairly close camera, the formal-abstract-inteilectualized content evolves at right angles to the camera, and usually signifies a filmmaker who has intellectually surrounded the material. In both cases, the strategy is often encasing a strikingly petty event: a nonviolinist scrapes away on a violin in a Richard Serra film; the limp Laurel-and-Hardy high jinks beginning Rivette's CELINE AND JULIE has one mugging charmer chasing another through Paris to return a book left on a park bench; RAMEAU'S NEPHEW creates linguistic/filmic systems using avant-garde types in low comic dress; and in Fassbinder's KATZELMACHER,two indolents gossip their way toward a reverse tracking camera - a startlingly handsome image encasing absurd, inane conversations. Each film picks up the current fascination with keeping things a little bit amateurish, as though that were an automatic connection to drollery and wit. In all the above-mentioned films, grandness and pettiness are blended in skeptical visions that significantly go against heroic careers.
The thing that strikes one about the early-Seventies Fassbinder BEWARE OF THE HOLY WHORE is the movement of both camera and actors, a kind of lurching serpentine of petulant drawling sounds, inside jokes, and minute-long temper tantrums. They're all like flicks within a flux of...