Aldrich & Associates special section

On 2 August 1998, the Aldrich & Associates symposium took place in Melbourne. Unusually, this event had no budget and no official or institutional status or sponsorship. It was Adrian Martin’s idea: he knew that David Sanjek would be in Melbourne for the first Cinesonic conference, and that Sanjek had presented a paper on Aldrich and Ulzana’s Raid earlier in North America: why not build an event around that? So we did. A call for papers went out. Anna Dzenis and helpers organized and convened the event; RMIT University-Media Arts provided the venue, thanks to Philip Brophy; Stephen Goddard took charge of technical support; and I compered the day. Sanjek delivered the keynote paper. Rose Capp (Monash University), Rolando Caputo (LaTrobe University), Adrian Danks (RMIT University), Sally Hussey (Melbourne University), Richard Maltby (Flinders University), Adrian Martin, Australia’s leading public film intellectual (and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of Screening the Past), Bill Routt (LaTrobe), and Rick Thompson (LaTrobe) gave papers. Caputo’s presentation included a remarkable video demonstrating the specific relations of Vera Cruz and Italian westerns. The spontaneity and cooperation with which the event occurred would have made an anarchist proud; the range and depth of papers certainly indicated a (surprising) currency of interest in Robert Aldrich and related topics.

From this rose the special Screening the Past Aldrich & Associates section. Participants in the 1998 symposium have provided new and improved versions of their papers, and other writers have answered the journal’s call for additional papers. In addition, Caryl Flinn has agreed to allow us to reprint (for the first time anywhere!) as our Re-run for this issue her extremely influential 1986 study, “Sound, woman, and the bomb: dismembering the ‘great whatsit’ in Kiss me Deadly“, a milestone in Aldrich criticism.

At the original symposium, contributions were organized into two sections: one specifically concerned with Kiss me Deadly, the other with, well, other issues involving Aldrich; and that is reflected in this Aldrich & Associates special section. Richard Maltby provides a deeply researched cultural history of Kiss me Deadl, beginning with the pop cultural milieu in which the original novel circulated, through the pre-production and production negotiations with lobby groups and censorship bodies, then tracing the film’s trajectory through film culture, implicating the film in Manny Farber’s construction of a particular film critical position. Adrian Martin’s take on this and other Aldrich films is particularly concerned with bodies and figural representation, reading Aldrich’s films into a larger fabric of both filmmaking and criticism. Caryl (then Carol) Flinn’s article takes film noir criticism a quantum step up, combining a new critical sophistication within feminist theory with a ground-breaking attention to issues of sound and the soundtrack to firmly reposition Kiss Me Deadly on the film criticism agenda. Rose Capp takes Flinn as her starting point, applying Flinn’s (and Kaja Silverman’s) ideas about sound and feminist critique not only to Kiss Me Deadly but to neo-noirs Bound and Lost Highway. Bill Routt proposes ways in which Jigsaw is a sister film to Kiss Me Deadly, and does so in a categorical way exploiting the extensive resources and possibilities available only to an on-line journal.

David Sanjek examines some of the central mechanisms and concepts which animate Aldrich’s work with particular attention to the conundrums of power, violence, knowledge (or lack of it), and comprehension (ditto) in Ulzana’s Raid. Brad Stevens chronicles the variant versions of Aldrich films extant on celluloid, television, and videotape as censors, distributors, programmers, studios, distributors, and stars whack away at Aldrich’s versions of his films. Val Forbes surveys the best of the websites devoted to Robert Aldrich.

An index of the vigor of Aldrich’s film work is this: decades after its appearance, writers are still trying to account for its specific qualities and effects. Sally Hussey, in a piece similar in depth of research and cultural historical method, situates The Killing of Sister George and its controversial lesbian episode, Scene 176, in its social and institutional context, then examines its significance in shifting the cinema’s conception of lesbian sexuality. Rolando Caputo looks into the doublecross western Vera Cruz and finds in it narrative and thematic patterns which lead directly to the Italian western and particularly Sergio Leone’s work ten years later. Adrian Danks puts Aldrich’s films about Hollywood filmmaking – The Big Knife, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and The Legend of Lylah Clare – both inside and outside of that mini-genre, and through them reads a palimpsest for Aldrich’s career. Bill Krohn returns to Aldrich’s generally (and deliberately) forgotten Cinecitta bible spectacular cum sword-and-sandal opera, Sodom and Gomorrah, and teases out the political and ideological differences between Hugo Butler’s original script and Aldrich’s screen version. Krohn also discovered quite serendipitously that Theodor Adorno was, if not quite a fan of Aldrich’s early television work, at least a watcher of it: Adorno meets Aldrich, definitely to be savoured.

Finally, I’m pleased to include Tag Gallagher’s study of Abel Ferrara. While its inclusion in an Aldrich section may not be an obvious move, two considerations: first, Ferrara is a contemporary version of Aldrich in his relation to the industry, his commitment to a visceral filmmaking of effect, his complex work with genre, his attraction to exploitation topics and methods, and his vision of the world; second, Gallagher is a critic formed by the tradition and trained in the skills of the deep auteur writing which recognized and canonized Aldrich.

It has been both a pleasure and an education to guest edit this special section. The pleasure has centred on working with such an array of good writing, criticism, and scholarship. The education involved learning how much work from how many different people goes into producing Screening the Past: after submission, each article requires a total of several working days from all hands to finally hit cyberspace. The first area of work, of course, is the writing of the articles, and I thank all contributors for their work writing and rewriting. Then the referees take over, and here I must call attention to the extremely detailed reading and reports they did; this work made my tasks as a tyro editor much easier and much more focussed. Then comes editing (I appreciate the opportunity for on-the-job training), and proofreading, for which I am particularly grateful to Ina Bertrand, Tim Groves, and Peter Hughes. Finally, production crew Caroline Kruger and Sam Hinton put the journal in final on-line format.

Thanks, everybody.

Rick Thompson
June 2000