The hand-held camera intrudes rudely into a Brooklyn bedroom. There, a pregnant young wife is but a few days away from the birth of her first child; she giggles as her husband presses a parfait glass to her abdomen in hopes of hearing his baby. The wife is Debbie North, a commercial artist and the sole support of her husband Bruce, a painter of unbought paintings. The people are real, and so is the rest of the cinéma-vérité film that follows their practice sessions at a natural-birth clinic and their visits to in-laws (Mom still wishes Bruce had gone into dentistry). A listener can even hear the chatter of Debbie's teeth as she is driven to the hospital. Finally, with Bruce exhorting her in the delivery room ("Push, push, push") and Debbie's face twisted, she gives birth to a boy in full view of the camera. "Oh, my God," he mutters. "Oh, my God."
From the Norths' lying-in, the two-part film shifts somberly to a different sort of hospital: one for advanced-cancer patients. Balancing taste and excruciating intimacy, the camera team now details the last days and thoughts of Albro Pearsall, 52, a Manhattan gold smelter dying of lung cancer.
Flickering Flame. Birth and Death, as the film is titled, this week provided a powerful start for the Public Broadcast Laboratory's second and possibly last season. A $12,5 million, two-year experiment of the Ford Foundation, PBL was founded to prove that public TV, if adequately financed, could light candles of culture and significance amid the darkness of commercial TV. But during its first year, the flame of PBL flickered disappointingly.
In the beginning, the lab's 96 staffers were infused with a save-the-world fervor. "PBL," promised a national ad campaign, "will use television as it's never been used before." But 25 Sunday-night telecasts later, PBL Executive Director Av Westin confessed despondently: "We took some deserved lumps for our brash we'll-show-you attitude. The year had its successes and failures, but it was not totally satisfactory from anybody's point of view."
The successes included a muckraking series on the meat-packing industry, a first-rate U.S. TV premiere for Harold Pinter's The Dwarfs, and a colloquy between a group of concerned college students and a melancholy Walter Lippmann. Most important, the lab exposed a not-so-latent racism in U.S. society. There were bitter confrontations between militant blacks and self-righteous whites, stark views of ghetto living conditions, including one film shot and narrated by Gordon Parks, and cutting satire, such as a Negro-slanted aptitude test (sample question: "How long do you cook chitlins?"), By chance, PBL's camera crews tracked Martin Luther King throughout the last three months of his life; the result was a stunning obituary that last summer was voted the best TV documentary at the Venice Film Festival.