The New Pictures

A Girl in Black (Hermes; Kingsley International). Cyprus-born Director Michael Cacoyannis, 35, son of a corporation lawyer, got his theatrical education in London and won a Diploma of Merit from the Edinburgh Film Festival for his first picture, Windfall in Athens (1953). His Stella (1955) was a box-office smash in Europe. A Girl in Black, quite aside from its merits and demerits as art and entertainment, should give U.S. audiences some sharp new impressions of what life is like in modern Greece.

The fact seems to be that in its social structure, Greece is none too modern. A Girl in Black is an Ibsenic study of what 19th century Europeans called "the woman question," and from the screen it breathes the musty atmosphere of a long-shut closet--the mid-Victorian kind with a skeleton in it. The main point Director Cacoyannis makes is that "respectable people" in Greece are still locked in the closet of 19th century manners and morals, and he seems to think it high time they broke out.

The girl of the title (Ellie Lambetti) is the daughter of a well-to-do businessman on the island of Hydra. Her father was killed in the war, and his family has fallen on evil days. To keep the big house going, they have let all the servants go, and they take in transients during the season. They take in two young men from Athens, one of whom (Dimitri Horn) soon has his eye on Marina. At first she is cool. She is bitterly ashamed of her family's poverty, and almost morbid with humiliation when the whole town starts to talk about her mother, who has been beating about the bushes with a local lounger ("The older the hen," somebody snickers, "the better the broth").

Comes the crackup. One day some bravoes in the neighborhood make sport of Marina on the street in the traditional Mediterranean manner. Heartsick, she runs home and sinks into her young man's arms. As a matter of fact, her knees are so weak with love, or something, that she sinks almost to the floor. Naturally, the young man invites her into the same bushes her mother has been using. Unable to refuse, she moans: "I want to die."

In the end, Marina decides to live, and she comes bursting out of her doll's house with all the thump and golly of an oldfashioned, wear-the-pants, want-the-vote feminist. Along with his last-century liberalism, alas, Moviemaker Cacoyannis brings a last-century sentimentality. But somehow, despite its faults, the film is all of a piece, all of a personality, well cut and remarkably well photographed. It is just possibly the best full-length talking picture ever made for $60,000.

A Visit with Pablo Casals (Irving M. Lesser). Great men, the Duc de Saint-Simon is said to have remarked, are God's means of revealing himself to the rest of mankind. In this matter-of-fact little picture the truth of the statement can be felt with disturbing force.

The film, commissioned by Manhattan's Mannes College of Music and made by Art-Film Producer Robert Snyder (The Titan), attempts to summarize in 28 minutes a day in the life of the 80-year-old Spaniard who is regarded by many musicians as the greatest cellist of all time. The camera briefly inspects the little town of Prades in the French Pyrenees, where Casals, until his recent move to Puerto Rico, made his home, calls at the gatehouse he lived in, watches the master give a lesson ("Don't think too much, just feel it"), and then settles down in dimness and the shapely silence of a thousand-year-old church to hear the cellist play Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major for Unaccompanied Cello.

And the revelation begins. Casals sits in a straight chair, dough-faced, tubby, so tiny that his feet no more than reach the floor. With eyes closed, and the fat fiddle hugged to his paunch, he looks more like a village baker dozing over a sack of meal than any possible kind of artist. But then he begins to play. Sudden, full, supple, the big contralto of the cello speaks. The music rushes like a river from a cave. And soon the audience may become aware of a peculiar thing. When Casals plays, it is no more possible to sort out the separate notes in the seamless flow of the music than it is to sort out the separate drops of water in a river. For Casals, a composition--from its first bar to its last--is one continuous sound.

And similarly the spectator becomes aware of another startling thing. It is not possible to watch any part of Casals while he is playing--not his face, not his hands, not even his cello. It is only possible to watch the whole of him, and this for the simple reason that the parts apparently have no existence independent of the whole. Indeed, Casals himself, while he is playing, seems to have no existence independent of the music. Watching him, it is quite easy to imagine that if the music should stop, he would disappear.

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