masterpiece of horror . 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 &apos;s das Wunder des Malachias ( the miracle of Father Malachias ) and Michaelangelo Antonioni &apos;s la notte . 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 : Frank Wysbar ( Fa&quot;hrmann Maria ) , Helmut Ka&quot;utner ( die grosse freiheit No 7 ) , Herbert Selpin ( Titanic ) , Wolfgang Staudte ( rotation ) , and Georg Klaren ( Wozzeck ) . it would now seem that Wicki &apos;s name must be added to this list , for his new film may well be a landmark in the revitalisation of the German cinema . Wicki is not only a director . he began his career as an actor , had his first important film r&amp;ocirc;le in Ka&quot;utner &apos;s die letzt bru&quot;cke , and he also appears in the new Antonioni film . in 1950 he began to take photographs not only in Germany but also in Africa and America . an exhibition of these works which is now on view in a Berlin gallery is most impressive . as Friedrich Du&quot;rrenmatt , the Swiss playwright and author , wrote : Wicki &apos;s blacks and greys are not only the colours of the lost and the forgotten , but they are also the technical means of abstraction . every unnecessary detail , all superfluous local colouring must be eliminated . he does not want the accuracy of a police photograph , but rather he wants to show the eternal in every instant . the chilling horror of Malachias is due as much to Wicki the photographer as to Wicki the director . his earlier film , die bru&quot;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 . following Bruce Marshall &apos;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 . one night his prayer is answered and the offending establishment is suddenly transplanted to an island in the North Sea . but Father Malachias &apos;s troubles have only begun . instead of having the desired effect , the miracle becomes exploited by a group of shrewd newspapermen . soon a carnival springs up on the sight of the missing building . 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 . Father Malachias goes to the island , prays , and in a second miracle the night club is replaced in its original setting . a summary of the story can give almost no indication of the scope of Wicki &apos;s artistry . 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 . here , the guests arrive in ghost-like yachts , the wildly flapping white sails slashed by the glaring beacon of a lighthouse . when the final miracle does occur , it is accepted as a marvellous joke ; no one has learned anything . Wicki suddenly returns to the city for a final epilogue . in complete silence he shows the faces of people walking in the streets , smug , content , satisfied , and thoroughly frightening . Wicki has succeeded in his second film in recording his personal apocalypse of the last days of a sick society . it is most unfair to call Malachias a cut-rate dolce vita , for it is far more intimate and deeply felt . 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 . to judge from the press , Wicki is to pay by being journalistically crucified in his own country . 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 . one can only hope that British audiences will have a chance to judge this powerful creation for themselves in the near future ; die bru&quot;cke is still waiting two years after its German premi&amp;egrave;re . la notte will be shortly shown in London and for that reason deserves shorter mention here . those who feared that Antonioni could never follow l&apos;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 . 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 . his method of painting with the camera has never been more exciting , exchanging the rocks of Sicily for the skyscrapers of Milan . 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 . strangely enough , the Berlin audience received the film with extreme coolness , much preferring Jean-Luc Godard &apos;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 . 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 ) . certainly one had the right to expect better . the other French entry , Michel Drach &apos;s Am&amp;eacute;lie , ou de temps d&apos;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 . 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 . this director is at last being re-evaluated and given his proper place in the history of the German film . 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 . prizes being what they are , Berlin is unusually generous in giving everyone something , and silver bears are awarded in every direction . 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 . gifted with an interesting face , although little acting ability , she would seem to be well worth watching in the months to come . new films . by Isabel Quigly . for once a cinema &apos;s advertisement does not exaggerate . the academy advertises Jean-Luc Godard &apos;s a bout de souffl&amp;eacute; ( translated as breathless , X certificate ) as the most eagerly awaited new film of the nouvelle 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 &apos;s intellectual manifesto is one that anyone with an interest in what the cinema is up to has been waiting to see . 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 . 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 . 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 . here in London in 1961 , we are seeing a bout de souffl&amp;eacute; too late , of course , to feel its original impact , or even its originality very forcefully : but even a short time ago it must have seemed excitingly new , even revolutionary , one of the films that , sick of the old guard &apos;s deadness , stageyness , and sheer lack of film sense , started what was then an anti-clich&amp;eacute; movement , a new way of looking at the world . but there is a gloomy truth in the old saws about revolutionaries turning into conservatives overnight : it is not that they are bribed or bludgeoned by the establishment , but that they turn into an establishment of their own . in no time at all their very revolutionary qualities are copied , and appear quite dismally hackneyed : 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 clich&amp;eacute;s that it is hard to remember the high - inordinately high - hopes it began with . certainly a bout de souffl&amp;eacute; ( which is almost a group achievement : Godard directed , but Truffaut - les 400 coups , shoot the pianist - wrote the script and Chabrol - the cousins , les bonnes femmes - was technical supervisor ) is extremely exciting , especially if you can forget what has come since . 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 do n&apos;t manage to perform ) their function of bringing people closer . it has a great look of speed and technical fun about it , of enormous cinematic enjoyment , and above all of cinematic sense . much of it has that air of improvisation , as of off-the-cuff living , that once seemed so new and so attractive . 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 ) : an affair that remains spiritually unconsummated as they move on to the final betrayal . Belmondo reappears at the Paris Pullman in moderato cantabile ( curiously translated into seven days &amp;hellip; seven nights &amp;hellip; A certificate ) , Peter Brook &apos;s film made in France and shown last autumn at the London film festival . in spite of magnificent performances from him and from Jeanne Moreau , this has been fairly well trounced by the critics wherever it has appeared . leisurely , even slow , rhythmically repetitive , the mysteriously simple story takes place on the banks of the Garonne , which becomes an unforgettable image . 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 . 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 : Delmer Daves , A certificate : Warner ) , a concoction as absurd as you could hope for , and a parody of every family saga and regional-folksy film from giant downwards . 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 . 