Town Bloody Hall

The camera of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the founders of direct cinema, is only out to record and to leave the situation intact. It wasn’t until years later that Pennebaker and his wife Chris Hegedus edited this public debate that took place in 1971 at the music and theatre venue The Town Hall in New York. It now stands as a cinematic document that takes us back to the spirit of the times a half-century ago.

What unfolds through the camera’s eye is truly spectacular. On April 30, 1971, writer Norman Mailer is engaged in a public debate with representatives of the women’s movement. At the table, we have the razor-sharp Germaine Greer, the renowned critic Diana Trilling and the lesbian activist-poet Jill Johnston. While the audience, which includes opinion leaders such as Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan, stays remarkably calm, the podium breaks out in a very lively and heated discussion. 

Mailer, whose attack on feminism The Prisoner of Sex had just been published, gets mercilessly attacked but manages to remain standing. How much has changed in the last half-century?