In memoriam

The Gilbert Adair files

Michael Brooke introduces our tribute trove of reviews, features, columns and wind-ups written by the late Gilbert Adair for S&S and our former sister publication the Monthly Film Bulletin

The narrative content of Gilbert Adair’s various obituaries has generally been weighted towards the last two decades of his career: the broadsheet columns, the screenplays, the books (fiction and non-fiction) and the translations (including the mind-boggling Georges Perec-sourced A Void). Although understandable, this has tended to obscure the fact that in the late 1970s and 80s, he was not merely one of the best writers ever to grace the pages of Sight & Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin, but also one of the most immediately recognisable. When he took over S&S’s pseudonymous Double Takes column in the mid-80s, he was rumbled almost immediately as ‘Heurtebise’, and the true authorship of the Roland Barthes-accredited April Fool, ‘The Nautilus and the Nursery’, was also never seriously in doubt.

Under his own name, he was a prolific contributor, and this selection merely scratches the surface. As an amuse-bouche (for what tribute to Adair would be complete without an italicised French interpolation?), we publish half a dozen capsule reviews he wrote for the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1979-80. His often-hidden Scottish roots are celebrated by his review of Gregory’s Girl, his future creative collaborations by a lengthy portrait of Raúl Ruiz (already a friend) and reviews of Bertolucci’s La Luna and The Outsiders (whose penultimate paragraph clearly anticipates the similarly rhapsodic prose of his novel ‘Love and Death on Long Island’), and his various cultural interests by a trio of reviews of music-related films, and of the work of some favourite artists (Antonioni, Bresson, Cocteau, Straub/Huillet), plus a juxtaposition of near-contemporary sci-fi films by Tarkovsky and Spielberg. Many pieces from this period were later reworked as essays for his idiosyncratic cinema-centenary celebration Flickers (Faber & Faber), which remains one of the most stimulating and provocative overviews ever published. RIP.