Dudes (do not) Rock: What We Do With the Films of 'Problematic' Men

Cinema Rediscovered, Polanski, and a Keynote Speech

In aid of thinking about men and masculinity at the movies — and toxic ones, at that, given my last dispatch on the passing of Alain Delon — I thought it might be a good idea to share the below text with you, dear readers. Back in July, I was kindly invited to deliver the opening keynote at Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered festival, who screen restored and little-seen repertory gems from world cinema history. It also happened to be the 50th anniversary of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, which screened from a newly struck restored print at the fest. So, I ruminated on screening and writing about the work of monstrous men, with some help from writers like James Baldwin and Claire Dederer. You can watch that talk and the Q+A to follow (with Watershed head Mark Cosgrove) on Youtube, or you can read it here, put in text online for the first time.

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Welcome, everyone, to the 8th edition of Cinema Rediscovered. I am so excited to be here for another year and to visit any number of worlds, untold histories, and remarkable stories. I saw Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust here for the first time; last year I saw an Iranian film I had never even heard of before, a gem of the new wave from 1964 called Brick and Mirror, that I’m pretty sure you could roll out the word ‘masterpiece’ for. It is rare that I don’t come away every year with a renewed sense of excitement about the gems of the archive and of the celebratory sense of the wealth and variety of film history. So when I was asked by Maddy and Mark here at Watershed to open up the festival this year, I was delighted. That was particularly so because one of the things theywere interested in having me examine here today was the question of the so-called ‘problematic’ film, and what it means to write about, screen, or even love it.

And of course it’s always a case-by-case basis, depending on your background and what you do or do not wish to see. But I do sometimes, on a personal taste level, have a perhaps incongruous love for macho flicks directed by men – like, say, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, or Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. And I have written before about what it means to love a movie that does not love you back – as a woman, as a feminist – and what a strange contradiction that can sometimes create in a person.

For me, the exploratory mission of Cinema Rediscovered is one of the most exciting and worthwhile out there, in that it does not shy from exploring those contradictions. That is to say, its programmers have always been interested in all nooks & crannies of the historical past on film. And that also means finding and celebrating hidden gems – and the women and people of colour who were ignored or whose careers may have been stymied by the power structures of that era. That has been a rallying cry of this festival since its start in 2016, and it’s an idea that I have long tried to express in my own work as a film writer and critic: that history, film history least of all, does not move in a direct line towards progress. That there are peaks and troughs in each era of movies dependent on the national cinema, the political conditions, the industry’s health, and the spirit of the generation making them.

So, for instance: an American film from 1932 might prove more progressive on women’s reproductive rights, which were essentially non-existent at that time, than one from Reagan’s 80s. Lianne Brandon, whose pioneering shorts are being celebrated here over the weekend with the Women’s Preservation Fund, made second-wave women’s lib films in the early 70s. Films like hers might suddenly seem much more applicable to a nation which has overturned Roe v. Wade and made abortion inaccessible to millions. Film history is alive in more ways than one; aside from the fact that new discoveries of literal film prints are still cropping up from time to time, even the ones we know by heart often prove to have more intelligence and mystery when we learn of their ignored female screenwriter. And while it’s true that old white men did, by and large, rule the roost - recency bias might have you believe that everything of the bygone era is plagued by antiquated values and terrible people, and that is not the whole story.

Cinema Rediscovered’s programme this year asks to look beyond that notion, without undermining the realities of the past. It is asking the viewer to look again at what they might see as a familiar narrative of movie history, and find more there. That means both re-examining movies we may have seen before or think we know the whole story on, and showing completely rare finds. This year, there are festival strands spotlighting Queer Stories from the Eastern Bloc, or highlighting the work of Jeff Barnaby, the fantastical First Nations filmmaker. There’s also a celebration of the work of British bombshell Diana Dors, who had a harder edge than the Marilyns or Jaynes she was accused of copycatting, and who starred in genuine social problem dramas like women’s prison movie The Weak and the Wicked.

As a part of the ‘Out of their Depth: Corruption, Scandal, and Lies in the New Hollywood’ strand, there is also a 50th anniversary screening of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the amazing sunshine neo-noir of Los Angeles corruption and capitalist rot. It is the job of writers, critics, and programmers to provide a safe space for exploration of a film like this; particularly if they choose to screen something which may feel tainted, in the eyes of many, by an infamously abusive creator. That’s what Cinema Rediscovered is doing with its panel discussion this weekend about the Polanski debate, and choosing to celebrate his film on its anniversary.

But even in the case of films which are simply thorny because of dated material or moments of dialogue that make us flinch in 2024, there’s an importance to letting the viewer in on what they may be facing, and employing trigger warnings. My feeling is that contextualising any film with a chequered past or antiquated depictions is pivotal, be that with written descriptions in programme copy, notes before the start of a film, or discussion before or after a screening itself; it’s hard to face and discuss the problem when you are too busy being floored by it.

I’ll tell you an embarrassing story for context, which I think is useful in illustrating why these kinds of warnings are so important. In my early twenties, one of the very first films I programmed for an audience was the 1971 counterculture car flick Vanishing Point. While it’s far from the top of the pile in terms of offensive content, I had also utterly forgotten a brief scene in which two hitchhikers - effeminate gay men, and totally extraneous to the plot - are humiliated by the macho protagonist.

I was deeply embarrassed that I had failed to mention it, but it made me consider something else, too. I’m a straight woman; maybe some part of my brain was able to reject or repress this utterly unnecessary and nasty moment of homophobia, displayed for laughs, because it had never directly affected me in the way it might have had an LGBTQ+ person. That, too, is part of the reality of considering these knotty topics: it’s about unwaveringly looking at yourself and asking where you stand in the viewer-artist matrix of privilege, and being aware of how your own identity and background impact how you feel about a moment like this. It requires sidelining your own feelings and considering others, no matter how much you love the movie.

The question of what makes a problematic film also becomes a question of authorship. The cult of the director - that is, the auteur theory - is a mercurial thing to judge by. It is a useful organisational method for understanding and consuming film, of course – and part of the larger work of Cinema Rediscovered has been to expand the remit of what we might call an auteur - in other words, traditionally white and male - to filmmakers from Lizzie Borden to Julie Dash. It’s a project shared on a larger scale by organisations like the World Cinema Foundation, and one which continues to either explode or explore the canon in ways which let us conceptualise anew what an auteur is and what it means. Equally, though, when it comes to the topic of cancellation, or the idea of apportioning blame for a heinous crime committed by a filmmaker, there’s the sense that the auteur dominates the picture here too. Nevermind the more innocent creative souls who may have worked on a picture.

Should the graft, talent, remarkable storytelling of artists like the late screenwriter Robert Towne, or stars like Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, go uncelebrated or unremarked on due to the crimes of a Roman Polanski? I think mostly we’d tend to say no, whereas contemporary actors who work with known abusers face a different and more strident judgement. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to consider the role auteurism itself has in shaping what art we consider problematic. Actors, for instance, sometimes seem to get more leeway. Take the majestic and undeniably problematic Alain Delon, appearing in Jean-Pierre Melville’s hitman masterpiece Le Samourai tonight at Cinema Rediscovered. Perhaps it’s because they play at being someone else for a living, and we end up seeing their identities in a kind of flux on screen. I digress: a film cannot be considered as a literal or direct product of one person’s biography; it is the product of unique circumstances, wide-ranging collaboration between tens of dozens of craftsmen, artists, and specialists.

Yet, in an ecosystem where film discourse very much includes the personal lives and behaviour of its creators, the question of how much responsibility critics have to offer information and context about the people who make the art we’re consuming is a nuanced one. How directly should we read biography - affairs, marriages, class background, single mothers, previous felonies - onto an artist’s body of work? I would say it pays not to be literal-minded; filmmakers from aristocratic backgrounds have not only made films about aristocrats, for instance, and the same goes for identities and categories of all race, class, gender, and sexuality. When it comes to those artists accused of a serious crime, or even an unpleasant but minor one, we may not be able to ever completely separate that knowledge from the work itself, regardless of the old truism of separation of the art from the artist. Possibly, we shouldn’t. But it is also limiting and frustrating to suggest one’s personal life is the source from which all art springs. It disallows for the quicksilver unpredictability and odd detail and even unwitting serendipity that so often make movies interesting.

The fact remains that to love cinema at all - and certainly classical cinema - it means to sometimes luxuriate in a land of monsters. It can be knowingly, with the D.W. Griffiths and Charlie Chaplins and alleged stories about the behaviour of actors like Kirk Douglas. Sometimes, as with Harvey Weinstein, stories flood our timelines and news feeds and we must reconsider their power, their influence, and their impact on the industry - and art-form - as we’ve known it. What we do with it, ultimately, is up to us.

Most people tend to pick and choose what we’re willing to be party to; putting ticket money in pockets of so-called living monsters of film is the line in the sand for some. Others simply refuse to watch certain films, or critics will decide against providing any coverage for certain filmmakers. For me, either as a critic or on a personal level, I have no desire or need to see a new Woody Allen film, but remain relatively untroubled by watching work starring long-dead stars who I know to have been abusers. I don’t think that’s uncommon.

There’s also the fact keeping up with all monsters living and dead would be a full-time job. You’d likely need to be a combination of professional researcher, legal expert, and officious censor, keeping a green and red-light list of artists who have committed sins – perhaps with footnotes for the unproven, the convicted, and the moral rather than legal crimes.

For me, one of the great aims of cinema is a far cry from that. It is to make us feel less alone - to make us realise the depth and breadth of human experience can be shared across continents, decades, and identity. Whether the experience depicted is tender or cruel, inclusive or unfathomably small-minded, it is not the job of the artist to be prescriptive. Or to provide moral instruction, or a design for living. That idea is not unblemished by the reality of abusive behaviour, but it is also linked to a film having a life of its own once it has reached its audiences. As culture critic & author Claire Dederer points out in her brilliant book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, it’s a particularly odd position when you’re a woman who has been at the mercy of some of this toxicity – but also in the position of someone who simply loves what they love.

She says, quote; ‘I’m not just sympathizing with their victims—I’ve been in the same shoes, or similar. I have the memory of those monstrous things being done to me. I don’t come to these questions with a coldness or a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathizer to the accusers. I am the accusers. And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper? This tension—between what I’ve been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one.’

Equally, from a curator or writer’s perspective, we are from where we stand now more aware than ever of the people whose lives and careers have been damaged or shortened by the conditions of filmmaking of the past; stories of systematic abuse, inbuilt racism, the historical punishment and exclusion of marginalised people. And so we must hold the balance - even, sometimes, the contradiction - in our heads. Part of the project of restoring and showing classic cinema is to bring the less, say, progressive impulses or figures into the light, too. To do otherwise is not to present a full picture of the past. The aim of cinema can be commercial or polemical; a film can expand our worldview and it can also, sadly, show us how pitifully flat the worldview of its creator is. This is, no matter how uncomfortable - if given the appropriate context and trigger warnings by its curators - within the remit of film historians to discuss.

For me, like Claire Dederer, it never feels neatly reconcilable; my enthusiasm for a film where Steve McQueen slaps his wife around in The Getaway, or one where Robert De Niro says, ‘you call those skanks girls?’ in Mean Streets, is bound to raise an eyebrow or two. Even if depiction may not be an endorsement, it’s still a curious thing. I guess I would say that I’m interested in how women survive in film - and concurrently, the world - in spaces not meant for them. How they often made it work by grappling their way through a patriarchal environment, or flouting what might be seen as conventional feminist behaviour in their efforts to move forward. And so the films in which women often get the hardest time from men, or their interactions with men are coloured by difficulty, often have a special appeal to me for their ability to look at the darkness of gendered power relations with such clarity. But listen: that’s me. That’s my taste. That may not be yours; but if we are talking about the role of film criticism and curation, we are talking about the ability to enter these dark corners and ambiguities, because that’s what good films do, too.

James Baldwin wrote that the artist’s role is to “make you realise the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” There’s a reason he puts those words together; for me, great art is borne of paradox, of holding two opposing ideas in the mind, of the doom and the glory of being human. There’s doom and glory in Chinatown, and there is in the realisation that we can be both victims and victimisers, guilty of terrible crimes and capable of beautiful and life-changing creation. There is no excuse or rationale for the fact Roman Polanski has escaped punishment for his crimes. There is also no denying that his work is prodigious, and markedly, prodigiously haunted.

The most dazzling works of art can also reveal pitiful human limitations – particularly cultural and social ones like homophobia, racism, and sexism. But seeing and parsing mankind’s limitations up on the screen is, maybe – arguably – sort of the point: to realise the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are is to face the ugliness of history alongside its moments of sublimity, not to raise oneself up on a pedestal and assume our forebears knew nothing. And therefore that our film history could only rear the problematic. It does a disservice to the memories of filmmakers and luminaries from Ida Lupino to Ossie Davis to not recognise the sensational work they made under circumstances stacked against them, rather than subsume them to a simple story about the bad old times. Looking at the remarkable career of film producer and festival programmer Lynda Myles, who is here as a guest of Cinema Rediscovered, also should prove instructive about the ways in which curation - even of films from the past - can be revolutionary on its own terms.

To really engage with cinema of the past is to hold both the hopeful and the troubling up to the light. This is never about dismissing the upsetting and even illegal things done by powerful figures in film – to simply excuse bad behaviour under the guise of male genius or craziness and give the patriarchal powers-that-be a free pass. But it is about reckoning with the complexity of what those moments onscreen - and figures behind the camera - tell us about the world, ourselves, our pasts. As Claire Dederer has it, there has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. There is doom and glory in all of it.

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Thank you, as ever, for reading/subscribing to Sisters Under the Mink, and coming with me on this journey through ‘Dudes Rock!’, an essay series exploring men and masculinity in film. I’ll be back with you this month to further explore the dark recesses of the male brain onscreen.