America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema Vol. XXIII No.3 U.S. $6.00 Canada $7.50
Herbert's Hippopotamus
The strange journey of Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School philosopher who fled Nazism only to end up battling Ronald Reagan in Southern California, is a great fish-out-of-water story. Paul Alexander Juutilainen's entertaining documentary glosses over the Hegelian-Marxist conundrums of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization in order to foreground the avuncular activist who inspired students such as Angela Davis at the University of California at San Diego - despite his disagreement with her orthodox Communist stance and enraged right wingers who viewed him as the virtual incarnation of the devil. Juutilainen includes some particularly amusing footage of Marcuse jousting with a dimwitted television interviewer. The interviewer insists that his guest is an avatar of violence, but Marcuse exposes his would-be tormentor's rhetoric with understated glee. At times, this tribute to one of the Sixties' seminal thinkers tends to enshrine an intellectual legacy that deserves to be examined with critical detachment. Nevertheless, Herbert's Hippopotamus serves as a valuable reminder of a time when at least some left-wing academics did more than keep up with current intellectual fashions and many believed that theory and practice were truly indivisible. (Distributed by The Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, NYC 10019, phone 212-246-5522)
-Richard Porton
