iy | — d, perish the | WORTH ) READING a % {:) ‘ = by Ne Sea_rriend and Foe. 4 dey So 8 TS, th wen) Fa . ies French actress Brigitte Bardot, eg latest picture is “The Truth” is shown of @ © above photo. Inserted is a facsimile 1 extract from the letter Brigitte sent to a Parisian paper against the OAS. Her condemnation of the OAS won her wide praise among democrats in France. Still time to see good movies ncluding Thursday, on] ye five days remain out of this year’s 12-day Vancouver Film Festival. Yet three and perhaps four of the most out- standing entries are still to come; Viridiana (Thursday, July .19, at 8:45 p.m.), the Jean Renoir retrospective showing which includes De- jeuner Sur L’Herbe (Satur- day at 1:30), Mother Joan of the Angels (Monday the 23rd at 8:45 p.m.), and the pos- sibility of Satyajit Ray’s Three Daughters (July 24, at 6 p.m.) still not confirmed at press time. Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana (made in his native Spain after an absence of a quarter of a century and smuggled out from under the noses of the Falangists) and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan: of the Angels (Poland) have much in common, although made in different parts of LOBAL TV BRINGS FEARS, NOT CHEERS, FROM MURR er BERT BAKER Month (bar accidents i a bad weather) Amer- . rocket the first TV : into orbit 3,000 Step ae taking the first ard global television. €re is, at least, one Mer} han C22 who refuses to be Ret about “world” to- in uetess” (a basic element ing aie way of life) get- 1S kind of lift. Teton 2c Ed Murrow, di- tion of the U.S. Informa- Dros ae looks at the ing ay of television jump- this tional boundaries in fimpje *Y not just with fran, ,{'SPleasure, but with For Orror, of 0 mean exponent Sg _“'S!on journalism him- by . “© anticipates nothing t i thos Nereased problems for the Yoneaged in building up Glop, Saad " al television would fa.” he Warned a meeting tives ®rican television execu- bene Month, that such ih ae ments of democracy bun Deep South as bus- ticigy;e. jaunts by white 8 auch Could be seen live Th areas as West Africa. trea T8ular exercise in Which ™ Orld” democracy *€eps China out of the by , Sorsky, 95. This book i Sag Oceanologist is ®o¢,, ° the fascinating 4 ty My, © Sea and d ; g Yster: eals with L “veg. “ties, solved and un- tt 3 the ag Pi: e faks of * an, the the origin of Water € composition of ing .. 22d the animals The ‘ in it, . ade : bi, “ings i ‘will learn of Pe Man .. @t the sea can 0n’s 22d of the Soviet Sci Contr; Bee 6 “ntribution to the © sea, thought, be seen live through- out the Far East. More significantly, it has dawned on Mr. Murrow that, if television can be bounced off satellites in one direction it can bounce off in others— including back! Ay, there’s a rub, if you _ like. : Mr. Murrow chilled (he hoped) his audience of free- enterprise spines with a pic- ture of Fidel Castro “‘seen as large as life from one end of Latin America to another.” Why (more ice, gentlemen?) all South-East Asia could very well be “drowned under a torrent of instant-Khrush- chev direct from Moscow.” Came the clincher: Satel- lite TV would ‘have no con- science, no principle, no mor- ality. It will broadcast filth or inspiration with equal facility.” What a pity Mr. Murrow’s meeting itself was not able to bounce over — live, of course — to the other side of the Atlantic. Viewers would have then seen the emotional responses of the smooth-faced, hard- headed disciples of the Big Sell, to Murrow’s desperate plea for TV to have regard for impact as much as in- come. Many faces must have blanched at such open sub- version of the profit motive. For, with an ever-ready eye on a fast buck — and with the same fervent opti- mism with which a U.S. real- estate broker has already sold off building sites on the moon — many private firms are busy making their own TV satellites. This has hair-raising pos- sibilities. Will the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo — scheduled to be the first global trans- mission of any length—reach a world-wide audience by courtesy of Blinking Denti- frice or Soft Soap Inc.? Athletes displaying ’ their Blinking white teeth in close- up; lady sprinters using “The soap that keeps them soft and supple” — an engaging prospect! : To try to pump ethics into the cash - register blood- streams of American tele- vision tycoons at this stage of the game is pretty unreward- ing. Their grass-root philosophy’ was succintly defined by U.S. producer John Hasty a short while ago: Television viewers cannot be regarded as an audience to be entertained. They are prospects for what the sponsor has to sell. Last week the U.S. launch- ed the first TV satellite into orbit to bring world-wide TV. This article was written ‘a few weeks prior to this event. The practical expression of this view is carried out on TV screens with dogged dedi- ‘cation, and no programs are permitted to interfere with the commercials. The aim? Batter the eyes. and ears of as many as you can, for as long as you can, with the Big Sell. And, with America’s tele- vision hammering away from 6 a.m. until, with “late night” shows, 3 o’clock the follow- ing morning (later at week- ends), the poor viewers are saturated with “the message.” The average American family is subjected to 117 TV and radio commercials every day. : As critic Jeanne Sakol has put it: in the U.S: television may soon “replace sex and baseball as the major cata- lystic agents in contemporary America. e@ The Big Eye has everyone nervous, fretful and unsure of what tomorrow may bring ’ __with the possible execption of the people who make foam rubber néck-rests . . .” Now, presumably, the peo- ple of Africa and Asia are to join the audience ratings, to be told to change last year’s Cadillac, to keep their OW armpits smelling sweetly and to get rid of bad breath. But Mr. Murrow is prob- ably more worried about the items which separate the commercials—the programs. These, according to New- ton Minow, chairman of America’s TV licensing com- mission, comprise a . ‘‘vast wasteland of game _ shows, violence formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, sadism, murder — and most of all boredom.” Why is Mr. Murrow so con- cerned? Large lumps of this “vast wasteland’ are being exported to far corners of the “free world”. in endless film footage. You can see “Laramie” in Hong Kong, “Rawhide” in New Zealand, “I Love Lucy” in Korea, and ‘Quick Draw McGraw” (no, not Welensky) in Rhodesia. And the audience grows daily, with the number of television sets in the world totalling 118 million and reaching out to around 400 million. € It’s prophesied, however, that in ten years time with global television, stations in virtually every country in the world will be telecasting programs to a potential audi- ence of a billion. So the battle for the eyes and ears of the world will be lifted off the ground — about 3,000 miles up in fact. This thought — with his fear of “instant Khrushchev” and “instant Castro” — is the one likely to lose Mr. Mur- row the most sleep. With US. television largely composed of what the “‘Guar- dian” described on Wednes- day as “instant pap,” Mr. Murrow’s biggest nightmare ‘is that global television will change the world’s appetite. Why, people may come to prefer not. merely “instant Bolshoi” to “instant Baseball and Bonanza,” but “instant Khrushchev” — and where : ~ would Mr. Murrow, the TV tycoons, Mr. Kennedy and all, be then? July 20, 19624—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 5 the world under different social systems and by direc- tors of different generations. Both of these masterful films centre in the conflict of conscience engendered by the divergence of practical reality from the Catholic dogma of its principals. They are never superficial anti- religious tracts (although surely both directors fully recognize the superiority of- scientific knowledge to the fantasies of religion) but profound philosophical prob- ings of the subtle shifts and balances that the facts of life on doctrinaire preconcep- tions. The destructive »force of Viridiana’s religious bigotry leads ultimately to the de- struction of religious faith in, a conclusion of uncomprom- ising and merciless finality. The priest who sins by lov- ing the ‘possessed’? Mother Joan and can find no solu- tion for life’s problems with- in dessicated dogma, com- mits an act of senseless bru- tality as his solution to the impasse. Both Viridiana and Mother Joan of the Angels are important artistic-philo- sophical contributions to our times. Czechoslovakia’s Trials and Tribulations (Friday at 8:45 p.m.) and the French La Proie Pour L‘Ombre (Prey for a Shadow) on Mon- day promise to be of interest.” Leaving aside Friday’s 6, p.m. spot (still unannounced at press time), the remaining programs are of limited in- terest. N. E. STORY THE BOMB Anthony Ahearn “It’s a bomb!” THE H BOMB