Town Bloody Hall (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Jonathan Kirshner

Produced by D. A. Pennebaker; directed by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker; edited by Chris Hegedus; featuring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling. Blu Ray or DVD, Color, 85 min., 1979. A Criterion Collection release.

In 1976, twenty-four year-old experimental filmmaker Chris Hegedus, eking out a living among the bohemians of Greenwich Village (this was decades before gentrification), landed a job with D. A. Pennebaker, the legendary cinéma vérité documentarian. Pennebaker was widely renowned for his features that captured Bob Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour (The path-breaking, genre-establishing Dont Look Back), and the 1967 Monterey Pop music festival (Monterey Pop). But the mid-Seventies were a fallow period for the filmmaker, and, offering only workman’s wages, he hired Hegedus as an editor, giving her the opportunity to explore and assess the large amounts of shelved footage from an assortment of projects that had never gelled into completed works. A partnership quickly blossomed; Hegedus and Pennebaker would soon collaborate on the feature Energy War, followed by dozens of other films over the next forty years (including The War Room, the award-winning documentary about the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign); the couple would marry in 1982. 

Hegedus was quickly drawn to the rough footage (shot on the fly without proper authorization by three 16mm camera operators) of an occasion from April 1971, the “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation”—nominally a fundraiser sponsored by the Theater of Ideas that was held in Town Hall, the storied auditorium on West 42nd Street in New York City. But, more than anything, the evening was a promotional confrontation between Norman Mailer and a panel of feminists, prominently among them Germaine Greer, who had recently published The Female Eunuch (1970) to some sensation. Mailer brought in Pennebaker to film the occasion; Penny, as his friends called him, had previously held the camera for Mailer’s three shoestring-budget forays into cinema—the wretched Wild 90 and the uneven but interesting in parts Beyond the Law and Maidstone. The latter in particular, shot in the paranoid aftermath of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, was an effort to apply Pennebaker’s signature style to an avant-garde film that aspired to blend fiction with reality. (It remains one of the great and philosophically unnerving moments for the Direct Cinema movement that when Rip Torn attacked Mailer with a hammer near the end of the production, and the film, at no time did Pennebaker put down his camera and intervene in the extended real-life brawl.)

Pennebaker didn’t quite know what to make of or do with the material his cameras recorded that late April evening, nor was anyone clamoring to support the postproduction and distribution of the would-be movie, and so the reels of film sat dormant for a half decade. But Hegedus dove in with enthusiasm, and sculpted the raw footage of the three-hour donnybrook into an eighty-five-minute film she christened, quoting a memorable moment from an exasperated Greer, “Town Bloody Hall.” The results successfully reflect her ambition “to make it seem like you were at that event, not a commentary on the event.” In 1979 the documentary enjoyed a modest release on the art-house/college film circuit, and aired on PBS in New York City before falling into cult-status obscurity, circulating in bootleg editions.

Until now, that is, with the release of Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film by The Criterion Collection. The new 4K digital transfer, supervised by Hegedus, is as good as could possibly be hoped for (the optional subtitles are helpful in following some of the mumbled asides on stage and shouts from the often raucous audience). The special features are outstanding, and invaluable in their own right. Highlights include an audio commentary track that is essentially an astute interview of Greer conducted by Hegedus as both watch the film; separate archival interviews with Mailer and Greer; a new documentary short about Hegedus; and the entire, infamous episode of The Dick Cavett Show from December 1971, in which Mailer was confronted—and again, bested—here by Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner (the long-time Paris correspondent for The New Yorker), and, eventually and definitively, by Cavett himself. (The episode itself has a powerful momentum and a climatic narrative twist, when Mailer, in his one strong moment, quotes the lines from Vidal’s New York Review of Books essay that so clearly, and understandably, had wounded.) The supplements are rounded out by footage from a 2004 screening and discussion of Town Bloody Hall in which several of the original participants reflect on the experience, and an informative essay by the critic Melissa Anderson.

A “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” was inspired by Mailer’s March 1971 Harper’s Magazine long-form essay (and subsequent book) The Prisoner of Sex, which was in turn a rejoinder to Kate Millet’s bestselling feminist landmark Sexual Politics (1970). Millet’s treatise attacked the patriarchal, masculinist, and misogynist threads and themes she argued imbued much if not most of the celebrated works of modern Western literature, and which in particular permeated the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Mailer. Mailer could be boorish (and, by his own later admission, obtuse) about the Women’s Movement—as he would repeatedly display on stage, screen, and in print. But The Prisoner of Sex, despite its inevitably wince-inducing, knuckle-dragging moments, is also in key passages a thoughtful, sincere, and introspective rumination on gender relations. (As an inebriated Mailer rightly complained on the Cavett Show, the complexities of his arguments were not taken seriously.) Given this high profile exchange of gauntlet thrown and response tendered, a public debate on the issue, especially in the early, earth-shaking days of second-wave feminism, was more than appealing—it promised to be an event. The Women’s Movement then was in full, disruptive foment (the previous summer witnessed the Women’s Strike for Equality); and Mailer was at the height of his fame, stepping onto the Town Hall stage having followed his Pulitzer Prize winning Armies of the Night (1968) with the even better Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) and the sprawling, sophisticated Of a Fire on the Moon (1970).

One challenge for the organizers was that many potential participants were wary of participating in an “event” alongside Mailer, whose lust for attention and towering ego threatened to eclipse any such proceeding. (On his show, Cavett would ask Mailer whether he might need “two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.”) Millett and several others declined their invitations, but a strong panel was fully fielded. The featured speakers, in addition to Greer, impeccably described by Melissa Anderson as “Resplendent in fur stole, sleeveless maxidress, feminist-fist pendant, and shaggy, luxuriant, brunette mane,” were Jacqueline Ceballos (President of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women), Jill Johnson (dance critic for The Village Voice and future author of Lesbian Nation), and eminent literary critic Diana Trilling. The front rows of the audience were populated by notable figures of the New York intellectual establishment (a somewhat cloistered uptown elite, as Hegedus took opportunities to underscore), including Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan, each of whom spoke memorably when the debate was opened up after the formal presentations concluded.  

Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall calls particular attention to three aspects of the evening. First, inevitably, is Mailer, who is reliably outrageous and routinely insufferable, and seems incapable of grasping that his novel, An American Dream (1965), indeed reeks with a rancid misogyny. (Greer, in the supplements, surprisingly defends American Dream, but notes insightfully that Mailer’s nonfiction is much better than his fiction, and, savvier still, that The Prisoner of Sex was “written out of fear.”) But however ill-mannered and self-satisfied, Mailer is not without charisma; more important, he allowed himself to be bloodied in this ring, and it was his notoriety that afforded a prominent platform for the full rehearsal of views fundamentally at odds with his own. The evening also revealed the deep and consequential divisions within the feminist movement. Ceballos’s NOW-inflected emphasis on bread and butter issues contrasted with Johnson’s radical lesbian separatism; Trilling’s thoughtful and well-articulated comments expressed a cautious, conservative incrementalism that was in some ways more tolerant of, in the terms of the day, “male chauvinism” than “angry feminism.” Worse, the disposition of the participants suggested that these diverse subcultures were more likely to fight amongst themselves than band together in broad coalition (a common tragedy of the left more generally). Trilling, a generation ahead of the others and ambivalent about much of modern feminism, comes across as much more invested in picking a fight with Greer than confronting Mailer. And back in the day NOW was notoriously wary of the “lavender menace,” fearful that branding the Women’s Movement with the stigma of lesbianism would be used to discredit the movement in mainstream American society.

Finally, as a movie, Hegedus crafts its structure around a Greer/Mailer axis, which works well both in terms of style and substance. Greer presented Mailer with his most direct and forceful challenger. Ceballos was self-conscious of her status as a nonwriter; Johnson was there, as she reports, to cause general trouble (after reading a spirited speech, two friends joined her on stage, made out a bit, and then rolled around the floor in passionate embrace—when finally called to order they all left the building); Trilling’s cogent arguments were those of the loyal opposition. Greer, in contrast, in her withering comments focused on “the male artist” and “the male ego” and Mailer’s work in particular. (It is also illuminating to learn that despite her confident, bravura performance, she recalls being nervous and intimidated, and that she “wanted him to find me interesting, intelligent, and attractive.”) 

The film’s principal visual motif was afforded by the (one suspects carefully planned) positioning of Greer and Mailer, sitting next to each other on the dais. As a result, the two emerging principals were often framed in two shots, sometimes looking at either other, more often not. But in all cases, Greer’s caught-on-camera reactions to the comments of the participants, and to Mailer’s often combative exchanges with the audience—eye rolls, head shakes, laughter, and expressions of shocked disbelief, all enhanced by the reflections of light from the animated gestures of her many-ringed fingers—set the emotional temperature of the room at any given moment.

Town Bloody Hall is ultimately a time capsule—many of the issues of contention now seem outdated—but one well worth revisiting. For all the shouting, theatrics, and crude vulgarity, at bottom, the evening offered a civilized exchange of strongly held points of view, and Hegedus captures a moment alive with possibility. “It wasn’t my brightest night,” Mailer reflects, with some understatement. Greer, and, from the audience Sontag and the writer Cynthia Ozick, land the most powerful blows. Had it been a boxing match (one of Mailer’s favorite analogies), the referee would have stopped the fight.     

Jonathan Kirshner is a professor at Boston College and author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society and the Seventies Film in America. He can be followed at @midcenturycinem.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1