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... A Sound Stage. In France, where the movement is called the New Wave, 60 young directors made their first full-length films in less than two years (1959-60). In Poland, 22 films both long and short are now in production. In Brazil, nine new directors have made their film debuts in the last two years, and two dozen more will do the same in the next twelve months. The rage and the revolution are rising everywhere, and everywhere the new movements are really one movement, a new international cinema in which all the world's a sound stage and the screen emblazons a microcosm of mankind.
With startling speed, the new international cinema has created a new international audience. It is a young audience; exhibitors in a dozen countries report that eight out of ten foreign-film buffs are under 30. It is a vehement audience; it applauds what it likes and hisses what it doesn't. It is an expert audience; the new generation of moviegoers believes that an educated man must be cinemate as well as literate. And it is a mass audience; financially, the new cinema is a going concern.
Not that foreign films have seriously challenged the commercial hegemony of American movies, which still capture two out of every three dollars the world spends on cinema. But in the last ten years they have doubled their take in the international market (La Dolce Vita alone grossed $10 million), and in the U.S., where in 1953 they grossed $5,200,000, they have in recent years grossed as much as $69,000,000.
Public support and their own technical economies have given a great measure of artistic independence to the men of the new cinema. More and more they have been able to say what they want to say and not what some banker thinks the public wants to be told. The results have not always been happy. The new men, in particular the very young new men, have turned out miles of absolutely asinine acetate, and whover wirtes thos subtilise ouhgt to be shto. Nevertheless, with stunning consistency, with the fire and élan of spirits snatched out of themselves and whirled away in the tremendous whirlwind of the spirit of the age they have wrung out of their hearts remarkable efforts of film. They have evolved through the last decade a vast pageant of heroic drama and gentle eclogue, of delectable gaiety and dispirited lust, of mordant wit, glittering intellect, grey despair, apocalyptic spectacle and somber religious depth. They have held the camera up to life and shown humanity a true and terrifying and yet somehow heartbreakingly beautiful image of itself. They have created a golden age of cinema.
Strong words? Perhaps. But consider the carat of the films displayed at the first New York Film Festival. The program was restricted to new pictures never before seen in the U.S., but the festival's director found a score of excellent shorts and half a dozen top-chop features. Among them:
> The Exterminating Angel, one of the strongest of Buñuel's many strong films, relates a harrowing parable of salvation and damnation in which the grand old anarchist pours all the vials of his wrath upon the idle rich and the mother church and in the process disports a religious imagination seldom paralleled in its demonian ferocity since the visions of Hieronymus Bosch.