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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, April 2, 1968
Politics, American style
1968 was supposed to be Lyndon Johnson's year.
"Johnson is firmly entrenched in office," said Democratic party leaders.
"It is extremely difficult to unseat an incumbent president," said the political pundits.
"The Republicans are going to wage one helluva battle for the nomination," late 1967 polls were saying.
As the new year rang in, the Democrats were quietly anticipating a nice peaceful Chicago convention, perhaps with a little excitement from Eugene McCarthy, but nothing really to worry about.
As the new year rang in Republican forces were split behind a bevy of candidates who, while crying "unity" and vowing to play no dirty pool, were still out to break each other's neck to grab off the nomination. Richard Nixon, George Romney, and even Harold Stassen, were officially in the running and the candidacies of Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan were awaiting only the proper moment to be made official.
And then Romney dropped out.
Nixon went on to capture an unimpeachable majority in New Hampshire while the write-in Rockefeller campaign stumbled home a far distant second. Reagan, Romney and Stassen were blown right off the track.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, LBJ's writein ballots accounted for a plurality on the Democratic side, but not a majority. McCarthy's surprisingly strong showing foxed any clear majority hopes of Johnson's supporters.
Godfrey Daniel, Robert Kennedy thought. Maybe of Lyndon can be beat. And he promptly announced his candidacy.
Well, maybe LBJ can be beat, but Nixon can't thought Rockefeller, and he bowed out.
And so the Republican Party vs. Lyndon Baines Johnson had turned into the Democratic Party vs. Richard Milhous Nixon. Suddenly Nixon looked more incumbent than the incumbent.
Reagan again said he had no intention of ever getting in.
So it appeared that we'd still have a convention donnybrook come August, but it would be among the Democrats in Chicago instead of Miami Beach where the Grand Old Party would gather. It was looking like the Republican delegates might have some time for fun in the sun after all.
And the whole political world got uptight.
But then, in a pre-April Fool announcement that seemed to be no joke, Johnson said he would not run again.
Johnson made his announcement at the end of a speech where he announced a de-escalation of the Vietnam war.
No more bombing, he said, which is just what McCarthy and Kennedy had been yelling for. He looked to be setting himself in a perfect position to knock off the upstart threats of the Minnesota and New York senators.
But instead he knocked himself off.
Early speculation was that Johnson would support Hubert Humphrey for the nomination, and several Johnson stalwarts immediately jumped on a Humphrey bandwagon that hadn't even been built yet.
The next illogical steps, apparently, would be for McCarthy to withdraw his candidacy and for Kennedy to offer to be Humphrey's running mate.
It all points to only one thing:
A resounding George Wallace victory in November.
—Robert Entriken Jr.
City Editor
Kansan movie review
Nine short flicks click
By Carla Rupp
The shorter form of cinema can be as vital and as exciting as its lengthier counterpart. This was demonstrated effectively Friday evening at Hoch Auditorium during the presentation of "New Cinema"—the Arcturus Collection, nine very short but internationally-famous films.
A cross section of the growing edge of film-making around the world, the program was met by an enthusiastic response from the more than 2500 persons who attended the sixth of the 1968 Festival of the Arts programs.
"New Cinema" was a superb example of non-conventional movie-making. Almost everyone of the films has garnered high recognition in a series of film festivals. They were not pretentiously oddball for the sake of looking avant garde. The artists were consciously stretching the potential of film beyond its customary limits.
The program opened with "Enter Hamlet," a soliloquy from "Hamlet" spoken by Maurice Evans and directed by Fred Mogubgub of New York. With questionable relevance, each word in this four-minute color film, winner of the Silver Lion of St. Mark at the Venice Film Festival, was given its own picture. From his pop-art lair. Mogubgub turned out a ceaseless capitulation to his time. In the retina's mad scramble to catch each word and image, one could never stop to register the linear order of the past.
In "Renaissance" (written, designed, and animated by Walerian Borowczyk of Poland), there is an explosion and a drawing-room is shattered. Slowly, with infinite effort, the casual objects of a life
reassemble themselves. A table, a basket, a brass trumpet, a stuffed owl, the family portrait, and the Holy Bible compulsively clamper back into place with a witches sabbath of rustlings and cracklings.
"The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film"—starring Peter Sellers and his "Goon Show" troupe and directed by Richard Lester of England—was as much been to view as it must have been to film.
The three-minute film "Two Castles," directed by the 28-year-old Bruno Bozzetto of Italy, showed a parable of the follies of human aggressiveness. Bozzetto employed the utmost economy of line and form—a fascinating vignette of an erring knight.
"Les Mistons '67," from a story by Maurice Pons, was directed by Francois Truffant of France in 1986. He did not use, or even need to use, a very complicated scenario. The two lovers in this film, Gerard Blain and Bernadette Lafont, became the stars of many of the later New Wave films, especially those by Claude Chabrel.
De Dauant, who fellowed a year of the leading matadors of Spain through his 10 minute "Corrida Interdite," created in this cinema a ballet which seems to be weighted with the authority of a reality Evert many times:
the unchanging ritual of death in the afternoon.
A type of visual music could be viewed in "Allures," an abstract color film made by Jordan Belson of San Francisco. In this voyage into the outer space of the psyche, images are fascinating and seem to project the operation of cosmic forces over immense distance, evoking a counterpart of inner subliminal experience. Belson's film possibly reached a level of perception that most of the other films failed to reach.
The last film of those shown Friday evening was France's Chris Marker's 27-minute "La Jette," a film seeming to show a voyage across time—a stimulating as well as a fascinating film. The lyricism of the music was warm and the words seemed to flow and play upon different time structures. Static photographs seemed to correspond to the stratification of memory. There were only six or seven seconds in "La Jette" of live action, and this action seemed to assume a kind of symbolic and carnal value.
All in all, "New Cinema," a collection of brilliant brevities, offered a varied program. Stark and often powerful techniques easily and in many cases powerfully compensated for the loss of the sustained development of longer films.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $8 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 68044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised to all are regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
The Hill With It by john hill
After rubbing furiously on an old Dr. Pepper bottle for hours a few months ago, Richard Nixon finally caused a genie to appear.
"Are you the genie of the lamp?" asked Nixon startled, as he stared at the strange apparition, emerging with a cloud of smoke.
"Nahh, I'm the meter maid. Your Edsel's overparked," he said drilly. "Yeah, I'm a magic genie and you get three wishes."
"You mean I can have three wishes and wish for anything I want?" Richard Nixon asked incredulously, a word that just now had to be looked up and roughly rhymes with spitwad.
"Well then I want Romney to drop out, Rockefeller not to run and finally I want Johnson to drop out, leaving the Democrats divided between two candidates." Nixon said, drooling.
The dreamed-of genie with the light brown hair nodded.
The genie couldn't believe his externally protruding audial appendages.
"Wait a minute—that's asking too much," said the genie, who knew politics even though his own involvement had never gone beyond routine work for the Stop Stassen committee.
"Magic is magic," said the disappearing voice from the bottle, "but you're asking for things that just don't happen."
Drama review
Brazil's 'Payment called'really bad'
By Jerry Balch
At the risk of being denounced by avid followers of Brazilian literature, I preface my estimation of the Experimental Theatre's "Brazil Month's" production of "Payment as Promised" with the opinion that the play is an embarrassingly bad piece of dramatic literature.
This play reads like a list of hackneved symbols with annotations lest anything obvious be overlooked. What all these symbols add up to is a more difficult task than is the anticipation of them, and the fault lies, at least in part, with this cast.
The payment promised in the play is a 25-mile hike with a cross on his back by Joe Burro, a good (i.e. naive, simple, headstrong, hearty) Brazilian farmer, for a debt he owes Saint Barbara.
The priest, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, refuses to allow Burro to enter the church because, as everyone has known for a long time, the Brazilian peasantry blended Catholicism with pagan religions. Joe Burro made his vow to the pagan equivalent of St. Barbara. He sees no difference between the two.
We, in the interest of humanity and human dignity and the voodoo-Catholic ecumenical movement, are not supposed to see any difference either.
Of course, the play is supposed to mean more than this. and perhaps it could mean more in a production of more imagination and intelligence.
The first obstacle to a broader interpretation of the play is the set which is designed to give expensive and authentic local color, but nothing more. It is neither abstract enough to invite larger interpretation, nor real enough to comment ironically on the unreality of the play. It fits the interpretation of the play perfectly and in doing so contributes to the static quality of the production.
Ken Marsolais as Joe Burro does an exceptionally fine job of acting throughout most of the evening. Until the last act, one can believe in his interpretation of this simple farmer, bewildered by the apparent hypocrisies of the urban world.
But simple devotion to a cause becomes foolish stubbornness. Mr. Marsolais, hindered by the supercilious tone of those acting the supporters of his cause, cannot transcend the image of a burro as hero.
Jo Anna Schneider as Burro's wife, tired and brutalized by her life with a would-be saint, is consistently good, although at times she seems more a haunted O'Neill housewife than a Brazilian farm woman. Anita Sorrells as the outspoken prostitute adds a vitality to the play otherwise missing.
But most of the remainder of the cast give stereotyped "cartoon" characterizations of their parts, leaving Marsolais and Schneider in a vacuum.
Particularly reprehensible were the constant distractions during some rather important scenes, brought about by the shuffling and whispering in the group of actors clustered around the bar.
The play is second-rate drama and the translation varies between stiff literalness and unnecessarily Americanized colloquialisms. There are hundreds of better, more interesting, and more "experimental" plays that have not been performed at KU.
As of late, the Experimental Theatre has seemed more like an experiment in international living than an experiment in dramatic art.