Thanks for the memory: Scorsese's elegy for rock THE ARTS London Pavilion/ Classic, Oxford Street 1- Gate Two A new era of rock musicals is imminent. We have already had Satutrday Night Fever, and a couple of weeks ago Amnerican Hot Wax told the story of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who was to a great extent responsible for establishing rock in its first multi-racial and subversive form. Every major studio has rock films in the pipe-line-CIC will release no fewer than eight this year- and the National Film Theatre is presenting a month-longa sea- son in August called "nEmer- gence of the new Musical: Rock Music in the Seventies". This kind of revival tends to be posthumous; and it may signify more clearly than any- thing else that the great era has definitely ended. Certainly The Last Waltz, the: most recent and by any standards the best rock film so far, is more strongly marked by its final and elegaic tone. Ostensibly Martin Scorsese's film is documentary, the cinema v&itd record of an event in the line of Woodstock (on which Scorsese worked as editor) and Gimmme Shelter. It was shot at the farewell per. formance of The Band at Win- terland, San Francisco, on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. The Band had been together for 16 years, since they were Ronnie Hawkins' Hawks; but, said the leader, Robbie Robertson, "at the end of our 1976 summer tour there was a strange feel- ing in the air, there was a sen-se of emptiness or some- thing. We just tried to under- stand what was going on, we tried to check it out in evely way possilyle. We even checked astrologers, the Bible, things like that. And, it all pointed in one direction: The Band's next performance would be its last." The venue was chosen because it was at Winterland that the group was first estab- lished as a major rock group in 1969. A six-hour event is summa- rised in two hours, which afford a bird's-eye view of two decades of rock music; the history of The Band; the ros- ter of their friends and some- time associates, including Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr John and Eric Clapton, all of whom make appearances; and tributes to their antecedents in country *and blues, like the veteran Muddy Waters who sings,- embraced in the reverence of the band, "Mannish Boy". Be- tween the nusmbers the five members of the group talk casually about rock, about their long years on the road (evocative as the phrase is), and of their overwhelming ter- ror that these 16 years could have extended into 20 and mid- dle age. On the surface the rmethod looks familiar, even if the event is not quite like the rest. But the special charge of The Last Waltz-even if you're not really responsive to rock (and I regret that I started off a bit too old for it)-comes from Scorsese's calculated and crea- tive treatment of his materials. Nothing is fortuitous or acci- dental or improvised (or hardly: it seems that the coverage of Muddy Waters is as good as it is because the cameraman had his earphones off and did not hear Scorsese's instruction to be somewhere else at the time). Scorsese worked closely with Robbie Robertson, who appears on the credits as producer of the film. Before the concert he had prepared a 300-page camera script, choreographing the shooting from beginning to end of the concert. Seven light- ing cameramen included out- standing feature-film cinemato- graphers like Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Szigmond. Three additional numbers including Emmylou Harris's "Evangeline " and the haunt- ing,- Straussian " Last Waltz " finale, were specially shot after the concert and interpo- lated. Scorsese. used his art director from New York, New York, Boris Levin; and they rented the decor of the San Francisco Opera House produc- tion of Traviata. "It was a strange Visconti kind of set- ting ", said. Scorsese; "I loved it ". For the finale, when the camera draws back from "The Last Waltz " number, and back farther until the sound diminishes to - a vague memory of an orchestra tuning up, they used the long lane of lights from the railway station set of Silver Streak. Scorsese, in fact, organized and controlled and augmented his documentary material as if he were making a feature film. He hardly once shows the audience, whose presence is felt only as the groundswell of applause between numbers, but chooses to concentrate on the performers in their web of spotlights, misted with the dust in the air. The concert, Robertson explains, is a cele- bration. "Of what?" asks Scorsese, who wanders on and off the screen from time to time; "a beginning or an end ? " The beginnings are in the ends. Nostalgically the group talks of incidents from the aspiring early days. The his- torical origins of rock are recalled; and the way that the new music killed off the very influences that gave it birth. The concert is a triumph, the music is ecstatic; and yet it is overlaid with a sense of elegy, though not regret. Scorsese perceives the memory of an. era and of his own generation. It is a great piece of vir. tuoso film-making; but beyond that, it conveys the sense of an experience. Even alongside Dylan and Diamond and Muddy Waters, Robbie Robert- son dominates the event, smil. ing, charming, gentle and def. initely the strongest man around. Asked what he will do now that The Band is over, he speculates ".Just make music- try to stay busy ". Evidently the outcome is not to be quite like this: his appearance in The Last Waltz has already resulted in contracts for acting roles. The National Film Theatre starts its rock season on August 1 with a special show of The Last Waltz and the first British presentation of a new, feature-length German docu- mentary, Wolfgang Buld's Punk in London. As a coverage of the British punk scene it is dogged rather than analytical. If I was too old for straight rock, I'm certainly too far gone to get into punk. I can only venture that, seen from the outside, it looks a rather sad and defeated kind of music. In the film, one of its promoters regrets that the search for music that would be truly egalitarian-without com- merce, without stars, without elites, without uniforms-was defeated almost before it began, as punk became com- mercial, created its stars and money men, and made shaved heads, coloured hair, razor blades and tortured clothes as *obligatory as long hair had been for the previous. genera- tion. To the well-intentioned out- sider, the frantic quest for ugliness and -destruction, the zombie look favoured by the audience, the mechanical jump- ing on the spot and the abuse *which are the marks of ap- proval, .appear more like a des- perate protest in the face of cultural deprivation than a creative musical response. Howard Zieff made two very attractive comedies, Slither (a chase thriller involving a large mobile home) and Hearts of the West. In House Calls it is sti1l quite clear that he has a very special talent for comedy, but he is handicapped by a script full of good ideas which four scriptwriters have not quite brought into line. The basic notion is comedy on Neil Simon lines: an odd couple past the age. of romance-he a surgeon just widowed and making up for the years of fidelity before the menopause; she a divorcee stripped of illu- sions-are engaged in the sort of sparring that ends in reluc- tant tolerance and possible matrimony. Walter Matthau, back bent and face irretriev- ably crumpled by the misery of living, cannot be faulted in this kind of comedy; and Glenda Jackson reveals an al- together more attractive side as a shrewd comedian; and if they do not exactly team, at least their differences make for interesting abrasions. Parallel with the matri- monial comedy and some sharp words about the Anglo-Saxon male chauvinises uncomfort- able conviction that the oats he is not getting are greener than the ones he is, there is a second line of satire about American medical practice. Sometimes the two themes are complementary; sometimes parallel; and sometimes they simply take off in opposite directions and have to be reharnessed by such desperate devices as putting poor Matthau in drag. The parts are often excel- lent. The scenes of the awful private clinic where the bill figures much bigger than the treatment are mostly stolen by Art Carney as the senile medi- cal superintendent, wandering in mind and body, but capable of terrible concentration when five million dollars or his job is at stake. For all its vagaries, it is full of fun. Afia Torrent, the mesmeric little girl from Spirit of the Beehive. with eyes like a baby seal's and a gaze of disconcert- ing steadiness and solemnity, is a gift-and also perhaps a trap-fo film-makers. Her special falents attracted Carlos Saura to build Cria Cuervos around her (the title Raise' Ravens refers to a Spanish proverb, " Raise ravens and they will peck out your eyes "). The grown4) Ai (Getrl. dine Chaplin) looks bck 20 years from 1955 on her child- hood in a hermetic oid house in Madrid. The chid Aia (Aim Torrent) witnesses her mother suffering at the hands of her neglectful and philandering father, a Franquist officer. She sees her father expire in the bed of his mistress, and her mother (Geraldine Chapli4 again) die from an agonising. cancer. Brought up by her urn.' loving aunt and an old family4 retainer, litte Aiia escapes. into fantasies that she is mis- tress of life and death, at will' conjuring her mother back to life. and destroying her enemies with her little tin d. poison. It is a beautifully filmed and- convincing evocation of the- pains and mysteries and certi- tudes of childhood. Saura belongs to the generation of younger Spanish film-makers which was awakened by Bufiuel; and there are frank'' homages to the master. The chicken feet in the refrigerator are a reference to The Exter- minating Angel. Afia's wide-' eyed delight at having, as she thinks, killed her father,- recalls the joy of the young Archibaldo de la Cruz at the death of his governess. Saura's film is not quite Archibaldo,: perhaps; but if it goes not much.- farther than an impressionist' evocation of childhood and a vehicle for little Aiia Torrent,2 it does it all expertly and touchingly. David Robinson7 Thanks for the memory: Scorsese's elegy for rock The Last Waltz (u) Punk in London National Film Theatre/ Essential Cinema House Cals (a) Plaza I Cria Cuervos (aa) Gala Royal