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 0900PM
Uncovered Documentaries
Seventeen
Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines
1983 USA
120 minutes
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IN the 1960's and 1970's, American film makers, equipped
with newly refined, easily portable camera and sound equipment - much of it based on the work of Morris Engel (''The Little Fugitive''), pioneered a new kind of documentary, one that could speak for itself without the ubiquitous, voice- over narration associated with earlier ''fact'' films like the old ''March of Time'' series.
It's in the tradition of these still very active ''pioneers,'' including D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert and David Maysles that ''Seventeen,'' by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, belongs. The film, which opens today at the Film Forum, is one of the best and most scarifying reports on American life to be seen on a theater screen since the Maysles brothers' ''Salesman'' and ''Gimme Shelter.''
In fact, ''Seventeen'' was not originally designed for theatrical distribution, having been conceived by Peter Davis, the producer, as one of six television documentaries to be broadcast under the collective title of ''Middletown.'' Each of the six was made by a different team of film makers who set out to explore some aspect of life in Muncie, Ind., the locale of those seminal sociological studies by Robert and Helen Lynd, ''Middletown,'' published in 1929, and ''Middletown in Transition'' (1937).
The idea for the ''Middletown'' television series came to Mr. Davis, himself a film maker (''Hearts and Minds''), when he was gathering material for his ''Middletown''-like study of life in Hamilton, Ohio, published by Simon & Schuster in 1982 as ''Hometown.'' Everyone connected with the ''Middletown'' television series would like it to be known that the television films are in no way adaptations of the Davis book. They are entirely separate endeavors, Mr. Davis emphasizes, and are meant ''to complement one another.''
Five of the Muncie films were presented by the Public Broadcasting Service in March and April 1982. The sixth, ''Seventeen,'' was never shown, apparently because PBS and the underwriting sponsor objected to a lot of the content. This would include, I assume, the rough language and also one of the film's ''narrative'' lines about the rather hysterical romance of a 17-year-old white girl named Lynn and a young black man named Robert. ''Seventeen'' refuses to observe the niceties of sit-com land where everything comes out happily at the end.
''Seventeen'' is, instead, raw material, by which I don't mean that it hasn't been expertly edited by Miss DeMott and Mr. Kreines, who also co- produced, directed, photographed and recorded the footage. The footage is raw in that it is not always coherent, and especially in that the film makers have not attempted - as far as I can see - to impose some arbitrary order on the events they witnessed.
These have to do with a small group of white and black teen-agers, the children of working-class parents, and their lives in school, at home, boozing, smoking pot, getting fatally smashed up in auto accidents and, at one point, preparing for a neighborhood race war. At the center of the film is Lynn, the pretty, tough-talking high school student whose pleasure principle is measured by the men in her life, including Robert.
Lynn's mother doesn't exactly disapprove, but she does point out that everything Lynn is doing is designed to upset both blacks and whites in their neighborhood, all of which makes Lynn more stubborn. As it turns out, Robert isn't all that serious anyway, as his black friends, who seem to be about the most decent people in the film, keep telling her.
Things start getting nasty when a cross is burned in Lynn's yard and when Lynn begins getting threatening phone calls, apparently from Robert's other girlfriends. Lynn reacts like a nascent Belle Starr. ''Listen,'' she tells one caller, ''my mom carries a gun and she ain't afraid to use it. Neither am I.''
Though Lynn's problems provide the movie with some sort of continuity, ''Seventeen'' comes most effectively to life in its moments of casual cruelty and emotional confusion - in the uproarious classroom scenes and in a beer party watched over by Lynn's life-of-the-party mom, who gently strokes the forehead of one tearfully drunken young man on the verge of vomiting. Some of it is funny, much of it is sad, and all of it dramatizes a pervasive aimlessness and ignorance that spells out cultural bewilderment.
As in all films of this sort, one can never be sure exactly what effect the presence of the film makers has on the behavior of the people being photographed. In an effort to minimize their intrusiveness, Miss De Mott and Mr. Kreines divided up the shooting, with Miss DeMott, equipped with a camera and sound equipment, concentrating on the women, and Mr. Kreines, similarly equipped, concentrating on the men.
The soundtrack often is unintelligible, and the lack of any special lighting sources sometimes results in very dark images. The total effect, though, is healthily disturbing and provocative. ''Seventeen'' does not provide answers or make judgments. Like good reporters, Miss DeMott and Mr. Kreines say simply, ''This is what we saw.''
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