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.