THE GREAT ADVENTURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 15

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

(Arne Sucksdorft-Films de France) G Cert. HOUGH I won't be so Hibernian as to suggest that producers and directors tend to lose sight of the visual element in films, it is, I think, a fair criticism of contemporary trends in filmmaking ‘to say that quantity tends to take the place of quality. Screens are wider, films are longer, the dramatic content (see below) more violent. The Great Adventure, which,won the International Grand Prix at Cannes in 1954, falls into none of these errors. It is just short of 7000 feet in length, the screen is the old four-to-three ratio, the mood is pastoral, the script, photography, editing and direction are by one man-Arne Sucksdorff-and in each of these departments he shows himself the complete master of his material. To see The Great Adventure is to enjoy one of the cinema’s finest hours. It is the photography which makes the first telling impact. The eye of the camera opens on a tracery of reeds, caught against the veils of early morning mist; a fragile vision as delicately evocative as an old Chinese print, and beautiful enough to make one catch one’s breath. A bead of dew trembles and falls from a stem of grass, one catches the glimmer of a white farmhouse through trees still insubstantial as smoke in the half light. Then the first level beam of summer sun is caught and refracted in a thousand tiny prisms on twig and stem and cobweb, One’s other senses begin to catch up, and one is aware of the stir of birds, of frogs croaking by the lakeside. Suddenly, from the farmhouse, comes the crow. of a cock, . The Great Adventure is a story of the changing year, as seen through the eyes of two small boys in the lakeland of central Sweden, a story of growth, of seedtime and harvest, of birth and death in the thickets and hedgerows and in the cathedral aisles of the forest. The dramatis personae, besides the boys and the adults of the neighbourhood, are the fox-cubs adventuring from their earth, the vixen plundering the fowlyard, the hare throbbing in the wheat-stubble, the lynx striking down the roedeer, the comical otter rescued and kept in pampered secrecy in the attic. Sucksdorff’s photography is incredibly fine -the product not only of infinite patience, but of superlative camera skill. Nor does he make the mistake of sentimentalising life, for he is concerned as much with truth as with beauty. The most he allows himself is a muted elegiac note, a small lament for the transcience of childhood and innocence.