At the National, the Jancso retrospective alternated with a season of new German films; at the Palis, the Red season (exclusively European features alter-nated with the Blue season (European plus North American features). The Red season included one Jansco feature; the Blue one German film. Africa, Asia and South America were very poorly represented on the program— a result, I suspect, of European bias on the part of the organisers ratherthan lack of film activity in those continents. Since the commercial cinema fails to bring us features from those continents, we look to the festivals to repair the balance, in vain.

Nevertheless, we were privileged to see the latest work of two master-craftsmen of the cinema, Jancso and Antonioni. Jansco's 'Elektreia' is another of his Red psalms, a post-Mao Greek tragedy set in Hungary and minus the tradedy. Mime replaces action, flat chorus speaking and chanting replaces dialogue, and large groups of people and horses are choreographed into constantly moving patterns. There is little narrative interest and the message is pure Mao unadulterated by Freud and other decadent thought. Brothers and sisters have only to kill oppressors and initiate perpetual revolution to reform the world. And yet Jancso's moving patterns and constantly moving camera are hypnotic and curiously liberating.

The new German films are much less polished than the other European entries. They show a preference for black-and-white, clumsy documentary technique and contemporary problems. 'The Occasional Work of a Woman Slave' concerns itself with the abortive political career of an energetic hausfrau-abortionist and inserts quotations from Engels and pages from children's storybooks among the narrative-documentary sequences. Kluge's purpose was not apparent to most festival views and his film aroused much hostility. He was, in fact saying that women's power can only be creatively unleashed with a change in society's structure (the bourgeois family is obsolete), and that under the present system all herenergies are wasted and useless. A provacative film, but clumsy, in execution. Wim Wenders has a lighter touch and more wit than Kruge. His 'Alice ' in the Cities' forms an anti-touristguide to the US and Europe, and presents a bleak grey view of modern cities. The disaffected, lone reporter protagonist travels endlessly by car, train, air-craft, and ship, finding the sights equally dreary everywhere, and travel meaningless without human relationships. The film is a salutary antidote to all the glamorous tourist promotion films which abound about us.

The most exciting film of the Festival, a truly riveting experience, was Rivette's 'Celine and July Go Boating'. Although marathon in length, it enchants, mocks, teases and perplexes consistently, and is never dull. Through the medium of sucking sweets, the two central characters embark on a fiction (the second-level meaning of the French title) which produces a film-with-in-the film. Rivette explores the vagaries of the creative imagination, its stops and starts and also mocks conventionnl film logic, melodramatic and music-hall styles of acting, and audience expectations. The film has the wit and inventiveness of Lewis Carroll and does, in fact, include a number of allusions to 'Alice in Wonderland'.