| SEX BOMBS : Hegedus & Pennebaker's Town Bloody Hall [8/10] |
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| Sunday, 13 March 2005 | |
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Town Bloody Hall is the raucous, rough-edged and riotously funny record of a debate on feminism held in New York one evening in April, 1971. The event was organised in response to the furore surrounding Norman Mailer's inflammatory article The Prisoner of Sex published a couple of weeks before in Harpers' magazine - Mailer himself chaired the discussion, sharing the podium with four women representing different strands of feminism: Jacqueline Cebellos, strident head of the National Organisation for Women; Germaine Greer, glamorous Australian author whose book The Female Eunuch had made a worldwide splash; Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston, the first mainstream media figure to "come out" as a Lesbian; and veteran patrician literary-critic Diana Trilling. With Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) in the audience asking questions of the panel, almost every big name in early-seventies feminism appears in the film at some stage - Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett are conspicuous by their absence (a chauvinist might speculate that they were washing their hair that evening.) The resulting footage famously sat on D A Pennebaker's shelf for most of the remaining decade until his wife Chris Hegedus stumbled across it, realised its potential, and edited it into shape. The film (whose title is taken from a comment of Greers that she has better things to do than bicker "with hecklers in Town bloody Hall!") was finally released in 1979, reportedly running in some European cities for up to five years. Which beggars the question, why didn't Pennebaker put it out back in 1971, when the material would have been most fiercely topical? The footage's technical quality was perhaps a factor - though the sound is for the most part as clear as a bell, there are several frustrating points when the microphones don't manage to record lines (usually shouted comments from the public gallery) which send the audience into hysterics: subtitles would be a godsend at such points. But there is something ironically appropriate in a film about feminism being made by a male director, long sequestered from the public view (a la Jane Eyre's ‘mad' Mrs Rochester?) then "rescued" by a woman. The film is thus invaluable as a historical artefact, and as a distillation of the political currents then raging in the USA and far beyond - but the reason why Town Bloody Hall endures as a minor classic of its genre is that it must be one of the funniest documentaries ever made. Watching Mailer and Greer trade barbs (and dirty looks) is amusing enough, but when Jill Johnston takes the floor the picture kicks up into a whole new comic gear. She delivers a rambling 12-minute, William-Burroughs-meets-Lydia-Lunch prose-poem about how "all women are lesbians," before rolling around on the floor with her lover (who's run up on stage from out of the audience). The pair then vanish off backstage to continue their business, never to be seen again - much to Mailer's increasingly exasperated chagrin. But even as we're laughing - and it would take a hard-hearted viewer to keep a straight face throughout - we never lose sight of the fundamental seriousness of what's being discussed: feminism, we see, isn't just about women obtaining equality with men. It's part of an intellectual process whose goals is a revolution impacting on all areas of society. Three decades on, these cultural currents have, if anything, only intensified - even if such sensational ‘event' debates as captured here are sadly fewer and farther between. Greer is still very much with us, of course, older and a little less posh - though it's perhaps a sign of the times that any documentary profile of her clashing with an opinionated male opponent in 2004/5 would have to feature John McCririck instead of Normal Mailer: Big Bloody Brother, perhaps... Neil Young 12th March, 2005 TOWN BLOODY HALL - A DIALOGUE ON WOMEN'S LIBERATION : [8/10] : USA 1979 Chris Hegedus & D A Pennebaker : 85 mins seen at Side Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) 9th March 2005 - public show |
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