Town Bloody Hall

A hilarious documentary record of Norman Mailer chairing a debate on 'the feminist question' in New York's City Hall on April 30, 1971. Great cinema, with chauvinist Mailer shaking his fist at feminist hecklers and being ripped apart by Greer and Sontag: the camera patiently hears out one of its 'stars', then flashes across the crowd to catch a face in full flight of uncontrolled expression. The battle of ideas in the debate is fascinating, the effects of the gap between 1971 and 1979 bizarre (so little has changed). But above all this is a demonstration of how the apparent one-dimensionality of film can become intensely dramatic: sounds disproportionate to images, voices erupting off-screen, dreams and convictions at their purest because caught in the moment of conflict.