The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 12

14 mursaay sopiemocr iu isjtu Farts guardian Black is beautiful BY CAROL DIX DEREK MALCOLM reviews new films AT LAST the Fellini Satyricon has hit London, dubbed in English, evidently to its maker's satisfaction, edited down a' bit since Venice, 1969, and accommodated oh a screen at the Prince Charles which" is almost, but not quite, equal to its visual virtuosities. Goodness knows how people are going to react to But I hope they find themselves in less'of a quandary than I do, having written only last week rather, disparagingly and now, after a second visit, wishing I hadn't. It seems to me at this moment a much more considerable achievement than thought a concoction of such depth of imagination and command of style that one ought surely to be able to forgive what Richard Roud called its near-prurient outsider's view of Petronius's unholy Roman Empire. Of course, we're looking through a keyhole like retarded adolescents. 1 Fellini's real triumph is that sometimes, to our discomfort, he makes us see another eye peering at us.

The effect is monstrously hypnotic The fragments Fellini has chosen to embellish come, from Apuleius and Juvenal as well as Petronius so that the becomes a sort of dream progression through which one dimly perceives points of as if being toM'a half-remembered story. The links are Encolpius (Martin Potter) and, his friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) whom we follow on adventures which allow Fellini so much scope for grotesquerie that fabulous images are glimpsed and thrown away in seconds. This is one of the film's strengths, and also its weakness. Its power is chiefly visual and what, we see is frequently so stunning that one could often wish for more content and less context. Still, it is a notable journey land the train waits long enough at various stations to-allow some extraordinary excursions we progress from a brothel I ''in the catacombs to Trimalchio's feast in a purgatorial Roman Savoy from Lichas's prison-like galley to the Minotaur's pit where Encolpius complains that he is only a student and cannot he expected to beat the equivalent of Mick Beautiful boys wink leeherously, gorgeous girls (Capucine, Lucia Bose, and Donyale Luna) almost' redress the balance, and there's a notable hermaphrodite (Pasquale Baldas-sarre) for the in-betweens.

The rest are a vast gallery of gargoyles come to life, like the population of some terrible nightmare, wriggling under the foot of the dreamer. Stunning camerawork in deliberately garish colour from Giuseppe Rotunna, incomparable art direction, and some riveting music from Nini Rota aid Fellini in his principal task, which is simply to astonish and to widen the imagination. Not bad aims for any director, especially one who more or less confessed on celluloid in making "85" that, though there was much more to see, there wasn't much more to say. This Satyricon' may not be pure Petronius, but it is certainly quintessential, latterday Fellini, dicketty soundtrack and all. Go on, have a good wallow.

You can always spit it out later. You couldn't have a better name for a beautiful girl who can't act than Erika Blanc, who takes the name part in Cesare CanevarVs turgid probe of contemporary sexuality, A Alan for Emmanuelle, at the Jacey, Leicester Square. Emmanuelle walks through movie asking stray men to bed her in as unlikely a search for "tenderness as I have ever witnessed. Each one fails her, remembering some pressing engagement or other at the' point of orgasm. Perhaps she should bath more often.

Or better still, perhaps Mr Canevari should find himself a sense of humour. The film has an enormously fluent surface, splendid colour, smooth photography, hardly a frame out of place. But its anguish is strictly manufactured. In fact, it is what you might call a battery movie. Which is just what John Hough's Eyewitness (New Victoria) tries hard not to be.

This thriller from the Bryan Forbes dieam factory constantly upends itself with clever touches, pseudo-original ideas, and off-beat plotting. Its panache, and it certainly has some, is fatally self-advertising. In it, Mark Lester plays a Billy Liar whom nobody believes when he claims to have witnessed the murder of a visiting African President. Peter Vauglian makes a good villain, Jeremy Kemp a convincingly uptight military policeman. The Malta location work helps and I must say it is not a bad evening out.

But, please Mr Hough, try to remember that the camera serves the story, not the story the camera. Relax, and you'll do something half as good again. Ever since I reviewed Michael Ritchie's interesting Downhill Racer (Robert Redford as an Olympic skier who is also a recognisable human being) 1 have heard the plaintive cry. But where can I see it At long last I can give Londoners the answer. The film goes on this week at the Essoldo, Chelsea, and will also open the new 300-seater engagingly called The Screen on Islington Green.

Good luck to the new enterprise and to the film, which ought to have had a proper London screening months ago. DAVID TROOSTWYK AND IVOR ABRAHAMS EXHIBITIONS in London LEROI JONES, the American bUck militant playwright, poet, essajist, and activist, once said that Negro writing can only be thought of seriouslv If the writer has not first read Herman Melville or James Joyce that is, if no account is taken of traditional forms of white criticism that depend solely on aesthetic judgment, finely tee centuries of art anct literature to espect certain constants. There is a huge chasm growing up between today's Mack writer and hi? white critic. You have to ask the question whether a white, middle-class, liberal, etcetera, critic really does have any grounds for judging the work of a black artist. White writers hsve often shown how far removed they feel from the black way of life, and how mueh they would love to learn.

Eldndge Cleaver laughed unmercifully at "whitey's" attempts to emulate the black man's music and dancing when he first discovered rock roll in "Soul on Ice," and --Jack Kerouac speaks for many whites when he talks "On the Road" about, 1 I were a Negro, feeling the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, darkness, music, not enough night. I wished I were" a Denver Mexican, oi even. a poor Jap, anything but wlnt I so drearily was, a white man disillusioned." When he is faced with today's black writing, the white man does not seem, able to cope. The Western intelligentsia has never bothered whether the judement of r.is art should be by aesthetic rules or not. Art stands and falls by its place in its history ahdby certain constant criteria.

But then that can only hold good for artists born and weaned on Shakespeare. Joyce, and "The Seven Types of Ambiguity or more important those who can identify with them. Dishonest critics This summer the Amblanco Theatre in exile at the ICA aro staging a series of Iunchtime plays about black and white power. LeRoi Jones's play, "The Baptism," wis produced there and in spite of audiences of over one hundred a day; it received almost collective criticism from the established white press' as "vicious'' and "nasty" and "dishonest" "If -we got any praise at all," says Ed Berman, who directed the play, "it was for the production, but not for. the play itself." Aesthetically, the critics the play was dishonest.

But how can the play be dishonest' Jones was using the play to show up white power, the power of the white religion to emasculate so many black people? It's the critics who are disV honest. The trouble is that they are very hung-up about their own concept Sf.ck says Ed Berman. That what they come to see. What they do see, they can't take. They're chicken." And critics do seem to be failing back on academic-aesthetic fine-hair quibbling, when what they really)want to say is, how dare this -man be so violent, so obscene, so irreverent The recent publication of two very militant, "black power" books Julius Lester "Look Out Whiteyl' Black Power's Gon Get Your Mama! "-and Rap Brown's Die, Nigger, Die I "-has brought a similar type of book review, and when LeRoi Jones's own success "Dutchman." first appeared.

Philip Roth argued that it was bad because the murder of Clay is not aesthetically justified as is the murder, by way of comparison, of Jerry By Peter in "Zoo Story." The" murder was, of course, gratuitous, but Luta's murder of Clay was not so much a symbol of the violence that comes when these "blacks" get militant' but a demonstration of the degree of Intellectual slavery white man has- over black. It may be all right for us in our ivory towers to expect to see the true working of art, but, as the near cliche goes, if you are an American Negro to whom every walk down the street could lead to murder or violence, then the gratuitous act is the reality. Hostile audience So, at a discussion of Negro drama in America in recent years, one can begin to understand why Robert' Brustein and Richard Gillman, eminent literary critics, were shouted down and openly called "whitey" by LeRoi' Jones and a largely hostile audience for insisting that the only valid assess-ment of dramatic worth is the aesthetic judgment. It could be said of the Negro American that he is only now beginning to design his own flag, atid find his own identity. Perhaps art will be one of the last houses we let him blow up.

We tried to force our culture on mm, our myths and beliefs we hoped he would learn (o respect money, but not property, be clean and go to church. But it is just over a century now since the abolition of slavery. And just as it took the Americans a century before they found their own literary feet, with Mark Twain's funky sense of humour, so is the Negro American now finding his rile. LeRoi Jones has returned to Newark, Jersey, where he was born and bred, but he has returned with his African identity. He is addressed by his'Afri-can name, and is involved more in the politics of Mack in a white America.

Everything he has written has been to our eyes crude, obscene, violent, white-hating, and not for the sensitive stomach or refined ear. But he believes sincerely that the time has passed when the writer can limit himself to aesthetic principles and declarations about faith in human potential. As James Baldwin once said about writing, it "demands a great deal of stepping out of the social situation in order to deal with it," but that, as a Negro. all the time you're out of it jou can't help feeling a little guilty that you arc not. as it were, on the firing line, tearing down the by Caroline Tisdall overtastefumess this would imply.

One of the drawings is typical of this on a black line in the midst of wide white space are arrayed four collage elements of varying heights and strangely, familiar metallic qualities. They turn out to be cut-outs from an old catalogue of that tubular sculptor, William Pyne, transformed into distant and more mysterious architectural presences. Two suspended and curving PVC triangles, side by side, one white and one beige, gently underline the nature of their shape and the differences in colour quality. But the two transparent rectangular ones fail to get anything going, in a poor light they fail to achieve the play of reflection that makes them effective. Troostwyk's of space and illusion in the drawings in nevertheless greater than the activation of space he achieves with actual objects.

Ivor Abrahams's Garden Fancies in the Lower Gallery are a complete contrast. To begin with they are engagingly mucky and obsessively hand-made sploggy graph paper, overlapping paint areas, mixed media, silk screen, Letraset, and finger marks. Some of these are studies of the garden environment last seen two years ago at the Camden Art Centre. These go down particularly well in the US, where Abrahams must be a true English curiosity. Some of the prints are a riot of colour imposed on photographic silk-screen and less attractive than the gloomier groups of yew trees, with never a soul in sight, and the odd clump of Letraset grass or crazy paving amid the paint and collage.

The severest of these have a slight twinge of the metaphysical in common with Troostwyk's collage drawings. At the Rowan Gallery Michael Craig Martin shows his last year's work AFTER THE seemingly interminable soft sell of the Summer Exhibition (an honourable exception being Nigel Greenwood's Summer at 60 Glebe Place, where you can still' see the only pieces by, Don Flavin, Sol le Witt, and Kienholz on show in England). Art is again upon the town. Reverberations via Edinburgh have stimulated thought, but it-is too early to expect tangible reaction. Art in is still largely contained within the galleries and considerably governed by their choice.

On show at the Axiom Gallery are works by two rather neglected English artists David Troostwyk and Ivor Abrahams. Troostwyk has an unfailing "sense of scale and proportion and a penchant for unclassic elegance that comes across as strongly in his drawings as m-bis wall sculpture. His quizzical questioning of the nature of objects aria signs saved him from the befoie he takes up the prize artist's residence in King's College, Cambridge. Last September his theme was free standing boxes, hinged so as to be manipulable Dy the viewer. This year his sculpture too has taken to the wall and the theme is balanced and cquili-' brious.

The constant features aic pivot irons with iron weights suspended from them. The vying of paradox introduced with his off-square boxes is continued now in terms of weights Iron is apparently balanced hy paper, three pulleys are grouped instead of two, to thwart the inter-venor, one pullev is exposed and the other hidden in a going, going, gone sequence. The overall effect is very refined, the cleverness somehow rather repellent. If the boxes, as Ciaig Martin suggests, were the result of his surroundings in Corsham and the pulleys inspired by St Katheryn's Docks, what, I wonder, will come out of King's Cambridge JULIO GONZALEZ at the Tate by Caroline Tisdall TELEVISION by Nancy Banks-Smith AFTER A PROGRAMME like "What Sort of a World Do We Want?" (BBC-2) one is very grateful indeed for Fanny Cradock. Not that there was anything wrong with What Sort of a World" It was one of those highly commendable, concerned, committed, contemporary programmes which tend, as Peter Simple once put it, to drive one up the wall with the pressure of a human predicament.

It was a report on families as they are and as ihey may be in the future. The programme ran through various possible permutations of the family unit, including John and Beryl who had live children, weren't actually married, and had terrible trouble with the neighbours. I don't wonder as Beryl, who erred on the side of candour, told us how terrible the old woman next door was. One hoped for Beryl's sake that the old woman does not watch BBC-2. People tend to be surprisingly frank in programmes like tins about their personal problems, and how they nearly left their husband but not quite.

When this is not embarrassing, it is apt to be depressing. Tlie popular family of two adults and two children (which is apparently and ominously called the nuclear family) may indeed prevent a population, expiosion, but it is liable to explode itself in divorce fro minternal stress and distress. The alternative is. of course, a co'm-inunc or some variety thereof. We saw a rural English commune which idyl-lically sang folk songs together, and a Danish commune which had everything, but everything, common.

Here we were treated to a good deal of rather weedy nudity, and intrusion into private ablutions as the commune soaped each other's backs in the shower. One contrived to keep a cigarette alight while showering, and 1 longed to know how she, or possibly he. did it. In spite of nudiU. it was surprisingly difficult to be sure.

I find children a great relief in this kind of serious survey. They tend to drop off during the discussions or gie the cameraman a hard time bv roaring with laughter right into his lens. I particularly enjoyed the little boy who, when asked by his sister who was on her best behaviour, '-excuse me asked what does excuse me mean Shift she shouted, provoked beyond endurance. It was a little hard to chew, a little difficult to digest, but it was something to get your teeth into. Which brings me to Fannv Cradock.

Now Fanny hardh belongs to this world at all. It is an escapist delight to see her. clad in white silk with silver trimming, attacking best end of neck with a meat saw. In case you don't have colour, I must mention that her mashed potatoes were tinged pale green And her idea of a simple Saturday lunch involves. I would say.

six hours' hard labour and a serious set-to with the butcher. UNTIL NOW Julio Gonzalez has been best known in England as a jumping off point for other sculptors, a sculptor's sculptor. He is familiar as the man who taught Picasso and Gar-gallo welding, and who opened David Smith's eyes to the possibilities of drawing in space with iron. The Gonzalez room in the Muscc d'Art Moderne in Paris has been a sculptors' pilgrimage over the past 15 years. In Antony Caro's terms he was the first sculptor," and Philip King proposed the major exhibition of his work (the first in England) now on show at the Tate.

This fame by reflection has rather distorted the emphasis of his work. Iron, though he made it his own, was the choice of necessity rather than predilection (at times he hankered to work in gold or platinum). Casting was a luxury and most of the casts on show were done posthumously. Trained as a metal craftsman his concept of fine art was for a long time painting (some of which are concurrently on show at Gimpel Fils) and he worked through many styles before his drawn-out and tortured decision to concentrate on iron sculpture. Only in the last 15 years of his life was he able to express the full range of his imagination.

His drawing in space so formally significant for: the development of sculpture from Smith onwards had spiritual as well as formal motivations that perhaps embarrass today. Material and space for Gonzalez were like body and spirit. Only the pinnacle of a cathedral can show us where the -soul can rest suspended. These points in infinity were the precursors of the new art," he wrote He was emphatic about the Importance of facial features in his work, nearly all of which is based on the human figure He was an extraordinarily withdrawn man and this comes across in the work. He doesn't hit you as you approach like David Smith you have to look into the work and it is well worthwhile.

Within the limitations of a material he sometimes felt to be restrictive the range is impressive. It reflects many styles Cubism Harlequin of 1927-29), Constructivism, and the Abstraction of the Cercle et Carre croup, Mask, Light, and Shade of 1930-4 and the "Lovers No 2" of 1933-5). The influence of Brancusi's oval head, the "First Born." (the Cagoulard of 1933-5). Picasso's stick-like dancing figures and Surrealism Cactus Man of 1939-40). A very individual Surrealist streak runs through much of his work, a gentle humour expressed in terms of elements reduced to their essential, as Hair of 1930, and the stunning little "Head with a Triangle" of 1934-6, or features accentuated in contrast 1th a old like Don Quixote's moustache.

During the war when welding became impossible, he took to plaster and produced the Jlonserrat v. omen, his social realist equivalent to Picasso's -'Guernica" in protest against the sufferings of the Catalonians These are formally completely at odds with the rest of his work and make a sobering end to a really enjoyable exhibition. The augtl," 1933-3S.