A tribute to Gilbert Adair

The British novelist, screenwriter, poet and former Time Out film critic died on December 9 2011 after a life and career that took in late 1960s Paris and books including ‘The Holy Innocents’ (which became the film ‘The Dreamers’, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci) and ‘Love and Death on Long Island’ (which became a film starring John Hurt). Former Time Out film editor Geoff Andrew remembers a friend.

It was with enormous sadness that I received, last Friday morning, the news that my friend Gilbert Adair had died a couple of hours earlier after a cerebral  haemorrhage, aged just 66. He’d been unwell for over a year, having undergone a near-fatal stroke which left his sight seriously impaired, but his death still came as a terrible surprise. After all, nothwithstanding all the suffering he’d been through in recent times, right up to his death he’d had projects on the go; coming up with ideas had never been a problem for this prolific, often dazzlingly intelligent novelist, poet, translator, essayist, screenwriter  and – this is where Time Out and myself come in – film critic.

Sadly, though I’d read his work, I hadn’t actually known Gilbert when he’d been filing reviews  both for Time Out London magazine and for the first few Time Out Film Guides edited by our mutual friend, the late Tom Milne. Fittingly, our first encounter was through the written word. It was the mid-1980s, and in my coverage of a BBC season of Charlie Chaplin movies, I took issue with something written about Chaplin by Heurtebise, the pseudonymous author (though the allusion to Gilbert’s adored Jean Cocteau rather gave the game away) of a regular column in Sight & Sound magazine.

‘Heurtebise-Gilbert’ responded to my comments in his next column, and so began an amiable spat on the Sight & Sound letters page terminated only when then editor Penelope Houston pronounced the correspondence closed. Except that it wasn’t: with what I would later learn was characteristic graciousness, Gilbert sent me a ‘no hard feelings’ letter, adding that if the occasion ever arose, we should perhaps continue the discussion over lunch together somewhere.

That occasion, as it transpired, would arise only many years later – in June 1998, to be exact – and the somewhere would be a tiny Finnish town north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, our paths had crossed in the intervening years – I was Time Out’s film editor and Gilbert wrote regularly on film and other topics for one or another of the broadsheets – but we only really got to know each other better when,  along with the American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (whom Gilbert already knew from his now fabled years in late 1960s Paris), we were special guests of the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finland. Run by cinephile extraordinaire Peter Von Bagh and the filmmaking brothers Aki and Mika Kaurismäki, the festival provides screenings, sunlight and vodka 24 hours a day, not to mention saunas, whitewater-canoeing,  reindeer  feasts, Finnish tango and, if you’re lucky – as we were  – breakfast with Terry Gilliam and the elusive Chris Marker. How could we not bond under such circumstances? Whether seeing Mauritz Stiller’s silent classic ‘Song of the Scarlet Flower’ (1918) in a circus tent, participating in one of Aki’s Kaurismäki’s informal movie quizzes or attending a ceremony to re-name a street after Sam Fuller, there was always something that would stick in the memory.

Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers' was adapted from Adair's book, 'The Holy Innocents'

After that experience, I saw Gilbert rather more frequently, as a friend rather than simply as a partner in critical crime. And I soon found that the ferociously intelligent writer who’d once, in Sight & Sound, penned a pitch-perfect parody of Roland Barthes in the form of a semiotician’s reading of the ‘Carry On’ movies; who’d brought depth to the otherwise often inane marking of cinema’s first centenary with the supremely incisive, illuminating and innovative volume ‘Flickers’; who’d proven a brilliant, even brave cultural commentator with the kind of essays later gathered in ‘Surfing the Zeitgeist’; I soon found that this extraordinarily versatile and perceptive  writer was as witty,  elegant and – it sounds awful, but it most definitely wasn’t – enlightening in person as he was on the printed page. In the tradition of that first encounter, our debates continued… but while he almost always stood his ground, Gilbert was never  once condescending. He was known for not suffering fools gladly, but also for his good manners, and he never made people feel he wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

The last time I saw Gilbert in good health, before his stroke, was during the 2010 London Film Festival. My wife and I were queueing for a movie, and Gilbert and a friend – a bona fide philosopher, as it happened – emerged from a screening of Godard’s ‘Film Socialisme’. We had only a few minutes to chat before going our separate ways,  and as things transpired,  I never did get to ask him in detail about his response to a film which I’d found hermetic and impenetrable . But more than anyone I know, Gilbert – Francophile, cinephile, eloquent critic and clear thinker that he was – might have been able to make sense of and discuss Godard’s swansong in a way I’d have found stimulating and helpful. Sadly, that conversation will now never take place. I shall miss him greatly, and consider myself privileged to have been counted among his friends.