Masterpiece of horror .sx AFTER ten days of intermittent , near fatal ennui , the eleventh Berlin International Film Festival was suddenly jolted back to life by two extraordinary films , Bernhard Wicki's " Das Wunder des Malachias " " The Miracle of Father " ) and Michaelangelo Antonioni's " La Notte .sx " The number of German film directors who have made first rate works in the last 25 years can be counted on the fingers of one hand :sx Frank Wysbar " Fa"hrmann " ) , Helmut " utner " Die Grosse Freiheit No .sx " ) , Herbert Selpin " Titanic" ) , Wolfgang Staudte " Rotation" ) , and Georg Klaren " Wozzeck") .sx It would now seem that Wicki's name must be added to this list , for his new film may well be a landmark in the revitalisation of the German cinema .sx Wicki is not only a director .sx He began his career as an actor , had his first important film ro@5le in " utner's " Die letzt " cke , " and he also appears in the new Antonioni film .sx In 1950 he began to take photographs not only in Germany but also in Africa and America .sx An exhibition of these works which is now on view in a Berlin gallery is most impressive .sx As Friedrich " rrenmatt , the Swiss playwright and author , wrote :sx " Wicki's blacks and greys are not only the colours of the lost and the forgotten , but they are also the technical means of abstraction .sx Every unnecessary detail , all superfluous local colouring must be eliminated .sx He does not want the accuracy of a police photograph , but rather he wants to show the eternal in every instant .sx " The chilling horror of " Malachias " is due as much to Wicki the photographer as to Wicki the director .sx His earlier film , " Die " cke , " was equally terrifying , but here the director moves out of the world of reality into an icy supernatural vacuum where the sun never shines .sx Following Bruce Marshall's original novel with considerable fidelity , the film tells the story of a little monk who prays that a disreputable night club near his church be removed .sx One night his prayer is answered and the offending establishment is suddenly transplanted to an island in the North Sea .sx But Father Malachias's troubles have only begun .sx Instead of having the desired effect , the miracle becomes exploited by a group of shrewd newspapermen .sx Soon a carnival springs up on the sight of the missing building .sx The Church rebukes the poor monk for his miracle , and as a crowning indignity the night club is given a gala society reopening on the island .sx Father Malachias goes to the island , prays , and in a second miracle the night club is replaced in its original setting .sx A summary of the story can give almost no indication of the scope of Wicki's artistry .sx He tells his story best in the faces of his crowds , recording every wrinkle and drop of sweat with brutal honesty , building up to a tremendous climax in the island orgy .sx Here , the guests arrive in ghost-like yachts , the wildly flapping white sails slashed by the glaring beacon of a lighthouse .sx When the final miracle does occur , it is accepted as a marvellous joke ; no one has learned anything .sx Wicki suddenly returns to the city for a final epilogue .sx In complete silence he shows the faces of people walking in the streets , smug , content , satisfied , and thoroughly frightening .sx Wicki has succeeded in his second film in recording his personal apocalypse of the last days of a sick society .sx It is most unfair to call " Malachias " a cut-rate " Dolce Vita , " for it is far more intimate and deeply felt .sx In 1944 Herbert Selpin tried a similar feat in " Titanic " by paralleling the last days of the Third Reich with the sinking of the great ocean liner , and paid for his audacity with his life .sx To judge from the press , Wicki is to pay by being journalistically crucified in his own country .sx Certainly there are things wrong with the film , but the print arrived from the cutting room only a few hours before its showing and could not be considered in finished state .sx One can only hope that British audiences will have a chance to judge this powerful creation for themselves in the near future ; " Die " cke " is still waiting two years after its German premie@3re .sx " La Notte " will be shortly shown in London and for that reason deserves shorter mention here .sx Those who feared that Antonioni could never follow " L'Avventura " with another masterpiece can rest easy ; he has done the near impossible and turned out what certainly must be one of the greatest studies of the renewal of love that the screen has ever seen .sx Less obviously complex than his last film , " La Notte " will undoubtedly have more popular appeal , but this is in no way a reflection on its seriousness .sx His method of painting with the camera has never been more exciting , exchanging the rocks of Sicily for the skyscrapers of Milan .sx But his society is the same , now even clearer , but touched with a melancholy compassion which is a strong sign of the maturity of his ultimate artistic vision .sx Strangely enough , the Berlin audience received the film with extreme coolness , much preferring Jean-Luc Godard's disappointing " Une Femme est une Femme , " a ninety-one minute hymn to " Vogue , " " Cahiers du Cinema , " and the worst aspects of the American cinema .sx From a brilliantly funny start , the work fizzles out into a series of repetitious sight-gags and personal jokes incomprehensible to the uninitiated ( including four plugs for Charles Aznavour) .sx Certainly one had the right to expect better .sx The other French entry , Michel Drach's " Ame@2lie , ou de Temps d'Aimer , " was late nineteenth-century French opera at its most beautiful , subtly romantic with a twilight melancholy which lifted an involved story to real heights .sx As a refuge from the welter of mediocre features , the retrospective shows are always of great interest , particularly the programmes devoted to the works of Richard Oswald .sx This director is at last being re-evaluated and given his proper place in the history of the German film .sx Most charming was his tongue-in-cheek " Unheimliche Geschichten " ( 1920 ) , five ghost stories with a light touch , and there was much to admire in " Dreyfus " ( 1930 ) and the virtually unknown but extremely important " 1914 " ( 1931 ) , which tries to show that it took more than just Germany to start the First World War .sx Prizes being what they are , Berlin is unusually generous in giving everyone something , and silver bears are awarded in every direction .sx Both the Antonioni and Wicki films took high honours , and the audience at the awards was particularly enthusiastic when one Miss Anna Kerima was selected as best actress for her work in the Godard film .sx Gifted with an interesting face , although little acting ability , she would seem to be well worth watching in the months to come .sx NEW FILMS .sx by Isabel Quigly .sx FOR once a cinema's advertisement does not exaggerate .sx The Academy advertises Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de Souffle@2 ( translated as Breathless , X certificate ) as " the most eagerly awaited new film of the 6nouvelle vague , " and although " new " is hardly accurate ( the film is two years old and one of those that gave the new wave its original impetus and excitement ) , certainly the film that " Sight and Sound " called " the group's intellectual manifesto " is one that anyone with an interest in what the cinema is up to has been waiting to see .sx Few films have been so widely discussed before their public showing ; and , as it turns out , few can ever have seemed such obvious prototypes , or have embodied so many attitudes and techniques that have since been imitated , exaggerated , caricatured , and ( therefore ) weakened , even made absurd .sx It is disappointing though perhaps inevitable that the young directors of the new wave made their best films at the beginning , and in most cases , far from going from strength to strength , have since either repeated themselves or deteriorated or ( generally ) both ; for their great limitation is the lack , once they have made their original point and asserted their independence of what went before them , of anything much to say , and the fact that the world they deal with , though at first it may look excitingly emancipated , is in fact as restricted as that of drawing-room comedy .sx Its centre of gravity is Paris , its inhabitants young people- students , spivs , petty crooks , layabouts of every kind- all with a uniform sort ( and style ) of sexual promiscuity and social aimlessness .sx HERE in London in 1961 , we are seeing " A bout de Souffle@2 " too late , of course , to feel its original impact , or even its originality very forcefully :sx but even a short time ago it must have seemed excitingly new , even revolutionary , one of the films that , sick of the old guard's deadness , stageyness , and sheer lack of film sense , started what was then an anti-cliche@2 movement , a new way of looking at the world .sx But there is a gloomy truth in the old saws about revolutionaries turning into conservatives overnight :sx it is not that they are bribed or bludgeoned by the establishment , but that they turn into an establishment of their own .sx In no time at all their very revolutionary qualities are copied , and appear quite dismally hackneyed :sx what was once fresh and surprising becomes tricksy and affected , and by now , in the case of the new wave , the movement is so barnacled with its own cliche@2s that it is hard to remember the high- inordinately high- hopes it began with .sx Certainly " A bout de Souffle@2 " ( which is almost a group achievement :sx Godard directed , but Truffaut- " Les 400 coups , " " Shoot the " - wrote the script and Chabrol- " The cousins , " " Les bonnes " - was technical supervisor ) is extremely exciting , especially if you can forget what has come since .sx It has now the familiar ingredients- a nihilistic attitude to everything , wry , built-in jokes , a murderer-thief hero- but it has , too , a startling freshness of style , a really surprising and illuminating way of looking at objects , faces , people as they talk and feel , conversations as they perform ( or don't manage to perform ) their function of bringing people closer .sx It has a great look of speed and technical fun about it , of enormous cinematic enjoyment , and above all of cinematic sense .sx Much of it has that air of improvisation , as of off-the-cuff living , that once seemed so new and so attractive .sx The story ( not that the story , in the sense of plot , matters much ; but in the sense of situation and movement it matters a lot ) is that of a man on the run ( Jean-Paul Belmondo ) , who spends a few days with an American girl ( Jean Seberg ) who is bearing his child ( though paternity is always a rather dubious business among the new wave) :sx an affair that remains spiritually unconsummated as they move on to the final betrayal .sx BELMONDO reappears at the Paris Pullman in Moderato Cantabile ( curiously translated into Seven Days .sx . Seven Nights .sx . A certificate ) , Peter Brook's film made in France and shown last autumn at the London Film Festival .sx In spite of magnificent performances from him and from Jeanne Moreau , this has been fairly well trounced by the critics wherever it has appeared .sx Leisurely , even slow , rhythmically repetitive , the mysteriously simple story takes place on the banks of the Garonne , which becomes an unforgettable image .sx This is a very individual film , mannered , subtle , literary , made by a man who is not necessarily a film-maker , without the exclusively , ferociously cinematic eye of , say , Godard or Truffaut ; but , to me at least , strangely satisfying and memorable .sx And for those who complain that Hollywood has grown too sophisticated to turn out anything really amusingly bad these days , anything like the old riproaring nonsenses in which Joan Crawford or Lana Turner broke their hearts in black velvet and mink , there is Parrish ( director :sx Delmer Daves , A certificate :sx Warner ) , a concoction as absurd as you could hope for , and a parody of every family saga and regional-folksy film from giant downwards .sx With a large blond youth of quite dazzling dumbness called Troy Donahue ; and Claudette Colbert , still charming amid the nonsense , and Karl Malden not knowing how to take it , all rolling eyeballs like a villain from East Lynne .sx