The Gift, a 40-minute movie made by a young commercial artist named Herbert Danska, cost exactly $3,123.17—or approximately one ten-thousandth of the sum spent on Cleopatra. But sometimes talent is worth more than Taylor. The Gift is the most brilliantly original U.S.
movie released so far in 1962, a stylistic tour d’esprit that employs a subtle and modern language of cinema to release a mood and distill a moment of great inward sweetness and intensity.
The mood is the complex and precarious mood of creative crisis and the moment comes in the life of a middle-aged painter (Kees Van Dyk) who is beginning to discover that success has problems as well as pleasures. To satisfy the public appetite for his work he paints too much, starts to repeat himself. Bored and anxious, he charges nervously about Manhattan, finds himself suddenly on a mysterious island in the silent center of the moiling metropolis.
Is it an island in the East River? Is it an island of the mind? In either case it is another world, a world of dying buildings and delirious weeds, an enchanted kingdom where no bird sings and no leaf stirs and the sun sits in a puddle like a madman’s eye on a plate. Then all at once the kingdom discloses its fairy prince and princess, a boy and girl (Curt Pfeffer and Hazel Ford) who wander amorously into a cosy ruin. The beauty of the girl compels the aging artist and the young man simultaneously but differently. While the lover loves her, the artist draws her.
When she comes out into the sunlight again, he gives her his gift, his drawing.
She does not understand, but perhaps her lover does, perhaps the artist does. He turns away, obscurely and wonderfully consoled and strengthened, as if in the experience he had found his muse again, had sipped at the dearest freshness of the spring of life itself.
This simple tale is told with extreme sophistication of style. Cameraman George Ancona produces images of poetic loveliness—but the eye is not allowed to linger on the loveliness. The amateur actors are cast with acuity and seduced into expressiveness—but the eye is not allowed to ponder their expressions.
Danska cuts restlessly from image to image, dims the screen to deceive the eye, blurs the voices to confuse the ear. Why? To diminish the impact of each part of the picture, to force the spectator to see it whole.
The Gift is a U.S. entry in the 1962 film festivals at Vancouver, Edinburgh, Venice. It is an impeccable selection.
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