Judith Williamson

by Judith Williamson
...
ritish critic Judith Williamson used to host a 1988 BBC2 movie slot called Fatal Attractions.Named after that 1987 Adrian Lyne movie that caused such controversy, it was a season of '40s and '50s films noirs designed to exploit the growing '80s interest in "neo-noir."Williamson would sit at a massive '40s-style desk dressed as a postwar femme fatale.As I remember, she looked not unlike Gloria Grahame.Going out late on a Friday night, these short introductions were worth the wait.They are all here, along with her more notable reviews for the London listings magazines Time Out and City Limits.Often lacking coherent themes, many a critic's collection is best nibbled at rather than read in its entirety.But Williamson has such a sure voice and outlook that I found myself with a page-turner.She never lost sight of the cultural and political ripples movies make.Being a mass art form, movies can usually be read as being "about" a wider experience.Williamson's prose melded aesthetic appreciation and "symptomatic" (social) readings with stimulating verve.The British like the idea that movies are somehow a branch of literature.Williamson recognizes that images themselves have energies, flows, and desires that exceed story and dialogue.She made you feel such frissons when she wrote about Gloria Grahame in Human Desire: "She slips through the film like a drop of loose mercury."Williamson proffers different ways of looking at different kinds of film, a liberating prospect given how varied the British audiovisual landscape became in the '80s.
...
Speaking at the "Black Film/British Cinema" conference in 1988, Williamson acknowledges the demands different aesthetics can make."For about the first five years that I ever watched avant-garde work, I found it really difficult; it was incredibly hard to learn to expect different things from films, not to expect resolution, not to expect closure, not to expect to care about the characters and so on."In the last era when the British mainstream, arthouse, and avant-garde between them proposed an interesting national cinema, Williamson was there.As 1986 -"British Film Year"-closed, John Akomfrah's documentary Handsworth Songs appeared.If the much-vaunted '80s British revival occurred around such evocations of our colonial past as My Beautiful Laundrette, this public and private account of Britain's black community looked at the past from the perspective of the colonized, a plea Williamson makes in reviews of Cry Freedom, Out of Africa and the flagship of that all-too-brief African revival that hit London: Med Hondo's Sarraounia.In the '80s video had yet to wither the metropolitan cornucopia of first-run, arthouse, and collective exhibition venues, and London was even more of a treasure trove than it is now.Williamson saw this shift from the public viewing space to the domestic delivery system as part of a bigger picture.
...
Williamson decries the erosion of public funding for minority filmmaking.During the lead-up to the abolition of the capital's unitary authority, the Greater London Council, an organization that had always recognized and supported multicultural activities, I remember seeing a massive billboard evoking the coming upheaval with B-movie clarity: LONDON, CITY IN FEAR.In 1981 Williamson and fellow journalists at Time Out went on strike to protect the magazine's egalitarian pay structure.In 1987 the civil service department where I worked went on strike when the government introduced performance-related pay.These events are not as removed as may seem.In the monetarist business culture of those years, they were symptoms of the same cost-effective estimation of human experience.Unafraid to debate with her peers, in her January '88 review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Williamson notes the Sunday Times article by Norman Stone attacking the new oppositional British cinema.
...
Discussing the phenomenon of Fatal Attraction, Williamson saw the demonization of Glenn Close's Alex, and by extension the era's puzzlement over what the writer calls the "Single Working Woman" as part of a more entrenched prejudice against particular non-conformist groups.
...
The '50s was another conservative decade, and Williamson brings an informed psycho-social perspective to bear on the fraught fathers and sons and damaged families of the postwar suburbs.Film noir is usually written about in aesthetic terms.
...
In her searching interview with Scorsese for Time Out, Williamson uncovered an eviscerating critique of masculinity that not only links it to the '50s melodrama, it put that '80s archetype the "New Man" into savage perspective."For here they are, flung at your face, those unfashionable qualities like rage, jealousy, paranoia, and also blind desire.But do liberating films have to show liberated people?"On Channel 4's Media Show in 1988 Williamson was invited to talk about the horror movie in the age of AIDS.
...
Williamson is very convincing.It is easy to see how all this ties in with the dread of epidemics and sex that overcame the AIDS years.Now that "zeitgeist-defining" has become a Sunday trivial pursuit, Williamson's urgency seems fresher than ever.In her introduction to the pieces she provided City Limits between 1980 and 1983, Williamson talks about what is wrong with the short form.Writing brief pieces to tight deadlines that bring a movie alive without resorting to clichés or unexamined assumptions can be a tough assignment.But focusing here on movies ranging from Chantal Akerman's News from Home to Fred Zinnemann's The Men, Williamson does the form proud.Even when she doesn't like it, she makes you want to see it to see why.For all its imperfections, Nightmare Alley becomes truly intriguing in her hands.Writing on The Lady from Shanghai, Williamson said: "The end takes us back to the beginning.

by Judith Williamson
...
ritish critic Judith Williamson used to host a 1988 BBC2 movie slot called Fatal Attractions.Named after that 1987 Adrian Lyne movie that caused such controversy, it was a season of '40s and '50s films noirs designed to exploit the growing '80s interest in "neo-noir."Williamson would sit at a massive '40s-style desk dressed as a postwar femme fatale.As I remember, she looked not unlike Gloria Grahame.Going out late on a Friday night, these short introductions were worth the wait.They are all here, along with her more notable reviews for the London listings magazines Time Out and City Limits.Often lacking coherent themes, many a critic's collection is best nibbled at rather than read in its entirety.But Williamson has such a sure voice and outlook that I found myself with a page-turner.She never lost sight of the cultural and political ripples movies make.Being a mass art form, movies can usually be read as being "about" a wider experience.Williamson's prose melded aesthetic appreciation and "symptomatic" (social) readings with stimulating verve.The British like the idea that movies are somehow a branch of literature.Williamson recognizes that images themselves have energies, flows, and desires that exceed story and dialogue.She made you feel such frissons when she wrote about Gloria Grahame in Human Desire: "She slips through the film like a drop of loose mercury."Williamson proffers different ways of looking at different kinds of film, a liberating prospect given how varied the British audiovisual landscape became in the '80s.
...
Speaking at the "Black Film/British Cinema" conference in 1988, Williamson acknowledges the demands different aesthetics can make."For about the first five years that I ever watched avant-garde work, I found it really difficult; it was incredibly hard to learn to expect different things from films, not to expect resolution, not to expect closure, not to expect to care about the characters and so on."In the last era when the British mainstream, arthouse, and avant-garde between them proposed an interesting national cinema, Williamson was there.As 1986,"British Film Year",closed, John Akomfrah's documentary Handsworth Songs appeared.If the much-vaunted '80s British revival occurred around such evocations of our colonial past as My Beautiful Laundrette, this public and private account of Britain's black community looked at the past from the perspective of the colonized, a plea Williamson makes in reviews of Cry Freedom, Out of Africa and the flagship of that all-too-brief African revival that hit London: Med Hondo's Sarraounia.In the '80s video had yet to wither the metropolitan cornucopia of first-run, arthouse, and collective exhibition venues, and London was even more of a treasure trove than it is now.Williamson saw this shift from the public viewing space to the domestic delivery system as part of a bigger picture.
...
Williamson decries the erosion of public funding for minority filmmaking.During the lead-up to the abolition of the capital's unitary authority, the Greater London Council, an organization that had always recognized and supported multicultural activities, I remember seeing a massive billboard evoking the coming upheaval with B-movie clarity: LONDON, CITY IN FEAR.In 1981 Williamson and fellow journalists at Time Out went on strike to protect the magazine's egalitarian pay structure.In 1987 the civil service department where I worked went on strike when the government introduced performance-related pay.These events are not as removed as may seem.In the monetarist business culture of those years, they were symptoms of the same cost-effective estimation of human experience.Unafraid to debate with her peers, in her January '88 review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Williamson notes the Sunday Times article by Norman Stone attacking the new oppositional British cinema.
...
Discussing the phenomenon of Fatal Attraction, Williamson saw the demonization of Glenn Close's Alex, and by extension the era's puzzlement over what the writer calls the "Single Working Woman" as part of a more entrenched prejudice against particular non-conformist groups.
...
The '50s was another conservative decade, and Williamson brings an informed psycho-social perspective to bear on the fraught fathers and sons and damaged families of the postwar suburbs.Film noir is usually written about in aesthetic terms.
...
In her searching interview with Scorsese for Time Out, Williamson uncovered an eviscerating critique of masculinity that not only links it to the '50s melodrama, it put that '80s archetype the "New Man" into savage perspective."For here they are, flung at your face, those unfashionable qualities like rage, jealousy, paranoia, and also blind desire.But do liberating films have to show liberated people?"On Channel 4's Media Show in 1988 Williamson was invited to talk about the horror movie in the age of AIDS.
...
Williamson is very convincing.It is easy to see how all this ties in with the dread of epidemics and sex that overcame the AIDS years.Now that "zeitgeist-defining" has become a Sunday trivial pursuit, Williamson's urgency seems fresher than ever.In her introduction to the pieces she provided City Limits between 1980 and 1983, Williamson talks about what is wrong with the short form.Writing brief pieces to tight deadlines that bring a movie alive without resorting to clichés or unexamined assumptions can be a tough assignment.But focusing here on movies ranging from Chantal Akerman's News from Home to Fred Zinnemann's The Men, Williamson does the form proud.Even when she doesn't like it, she makes you want to see it to see why.For all its imperfections, Nightmare Alley becomes truly intriguing in her hands.Writing on The Lady from Shanghai, Williamson said: "The end takes us back to the beginning.