Michael Roemer's 1964 "Nothing but a Man"

Michael Roemer swore by the power of stories. To bring a situation to life, he recounted myriads of stories — to family and friends, to his students, to anyone who would listen openly. Like Jean Renoir, in whose company Roemer belongs, he had an anecdote for every occasion.

Roemer was an artist formed from at least three centuries. He was born into a Berlin Jewish family in 1928, shaped by fin-de-siécle aesthetics and politics; Freud and the Brothers Grimm loomed in his imaginary. He lived through most of the 20th century, narrowly surviving Hitler’s Holocaust by being one of the children aboard the Kindertransport, a British rescue effort between 1938 and 1940 that brought 10,000 Jewish kids into Great Britain as an escape from Nazi persecution. Roemer’s seven films and his dozen or so unmade screenplays are testament to a life saved by, as he would himself interpret it, sheer Dickensian providence; the Roemer oeuvre is like a 20th century continued exploration of the problems set forth in Henry James novels, alienated and family-bound individuals caught between the poles of European tradition and U.S. innocence, the Old World and the New, whether the family is Black or Jewish, whether from New England or Central America. And Roemer survived long enough into the 21st century to note its chaotic shifts: the revolutions (and counter-revolutions) brought forth by digital technologies, social media, and the resurgence of reactionary provincialisms that threatened what he came to understand as the American condition. And what was the American condition, chez Roemer? His films — and his upcoming memoir, which I edited — express it all.

But Roemer’s own times — and the times in which this writing appears, sadly posthumously — were not enough to deter him from his own homegrown theory that humans, for countless centuries in the past and to come, must reinvent themselves; they must reconcile their sense of individual free will with the unpredictable whims of history and the natural universe. “We must exist, even if we might not”: the Roemer aphorism par excellence. A peculiar type of optimistic fatalism defines Roemer’s sensibility. He was always aware that this sensibility would alienate whatever audience might have gathered in his lifetime around his “unmarketable stories,” as he called his films and screenplays. Indeed, heedless of commercial viability, Roemer filmed, edited, and released, with Nothing But a Man (1964), The Plot Against Harry (1971/1990), Dying (1976), Pilgrim, Farewell (1980), and Vengeance is Mine (1984) , a remarkable, cohesive, and honest body of work.

For those who had the privilege to speak to or know Michael, his ruthless honesty and sharp sense of self-critique only added to his magnetism and charisma. I, for one, will never forget the occasion upon which I had the chance to listen to Michael expound upon his philosophy. This was December 16, 2017, when I logged in my diary that I had seen the Kino Lorber DVD of his first narrative feature, Nothing but a Man (1964). The film blew me away. I found it an exacting study of faces and behaviors, struggling to be human, to “exist” in Roemer-ese, in the oppressively racist world of the rural U.S. South. I had witnessed a story firmly centered on real-feeling people—Abbey Lincoln and Ivan Dixon, who gave a face to the complex political, social, economic, and gender tensions that the film maturely and intelligently negotiates. The world depicted is not pat, nor does it come from an arbitrarily abstract place inside Michael Roemer's or his key collaborator Robert Young's heads; instead, we are concerned with interiors, Motown songs on the stereo, lively church congregations, dancing for the hell of it. The alcoholic father looks at his son like a pesky scab; the father's girlfriend Lee (a stupendous supporting turn by Gloria Foster) answers his question, "What else do you want?" with a terse, three-word fact: "He's your son." Lee shows she understands Ivan Dixon's Duff (who she's known for barely half an hour) better than either Will or Duff have understood their child their entire lives. When Duff comes home, he has had his humanity and his manhood robbed, once again; he slams his pregnant wife (Lincoln) to the ground, a brute patriarchal reflex, in order to restore his self-esteem. The immortal jazz legend Abbey Lincoln's heartbreaking embrace in the end—sunlight bathes her face like a Vermeer, hers is the reaction we are concerned with the most—is a heady mix of desperation, resilience, fear, and forgiveness. It shocked me even earlier in the picture when I heard the sound of Abbey Lincoln gargling. It was such a beautiful, quotidian sound. I thought, with wonder and fury, "Why do we rarely hear this? Why don’t we see this kind of quiet, peopled depth?"

Watching the DVD extras at the end, wanting to know who realized this marvelous achievement, I was struck by the soft-spoken power of Michael Roemer, this Berlin-born Jewish man who must have been, up to that point, one of the few white filmmakers I'd ever heard say they would not make a film like Nothing but a Man today, or recognizing that the film had many flaws and was open to discussing them:

I just feel I don't know enough, you know? For instance, in Nothing But a Man, there's so little humor. I think that that element is missing in the film. As it is in the Jewish community, I'd never make a film about Jews without the element of humor. I actually think we were very lucky: That this was a story we were allowed to tell, that it was their story, but we were allowed to tell it, because no one was telling it. Today, they don't need us at all.

I was surprised to hear a filmmaker critique his own beautiful work with such candor. He did not like the “positivist” ending, in which Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) holds his wife Josie (Abby Lincoln) as he says, “Baby, I feel so free.” Dixon did not want to say this, thinking that the film should end with the line right before it: “Ain’t gonna be easy, baby, but it's going to be alright.” Roemer insisted that the line remain — much to Roemer’s later regret: “Ivan was completely right.” He furthermore has been vocal about Duff Anderson’s arc being too assuaging and treacly for his own taste. As he writes in the introduction to the script of The Plot Against Harry,

what troubled me was that it ‘worked’ so well. Without being fully aware of it, we had met the wishes and expectations of the middle-class audience — all the more effectively because we dressed them with well-observed facts. […] It bothered me that Duff Anderson conformed so neatly to the traditional image of an American hero, albeit in black, and that only the presence and personal strength of Abbey Lincoln saved her role as his wife from cloying sweetness.

I was totally won over by Roemer’s candidness. I still can’t remember why I didn’t immediately run out to watch everything else he’d done. My library did not have his only other film available on DVD, The Plot Against Harry. The rest of his films — Pilgrim Farewell, Cortile Cascino, Dying, and Haunted (which had still not been renamed to Michael’s preferred title Vengeance is Mine, taken from the epigraph to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) — were practically nonexistent, unavailable to watch in any format beyond maybe an obscure film print in someone’s collection.

The situation began to change in 2022, through the efforts of the Film Desk’s president and head of distribution, Jake Perlin. All of a sudden, NY repertory audiences were treated to a brand new restored 35mm print of Roemer’s last film, Vengeance is Mine (released in 1984 when he was 56, with 41 more years of life — and unrealized screenplays — to go). Needless to say, it was a total shock for those of us seeing, practically for the first time, Roemer’s shape-shifting 1984 masterpiece of a genre that Roemer practically invented: “New England melodrama.” Vengeance is Mine screened at the London Film Festival and Berlinale the same year. As Perlin, who has been instrumental in the rediscovery of Michael Roemer’s work, has written, “Vengeance is Mine is not a lost film, and not necessarily even a forgotten one, as so few saw it to begin with (and those who did would have known it as Haunted [which aired only once on March 20, 1984 as part of PBS’s American Playhouse]. Nearly no writing contemporaneous to the television airing exists, with the exception of a New York Times review (not positive), a small capsule in People (positive), and a review in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.” Though it was lost to the opaque catacombs of 80s TV, in another world it would have gotten as much instant praise and accolades as, say, Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (which I saw for the first time at Lincoln Center the night before I watched Vengeance is Mine, and to which this film sports uncanny resemblances: the dissolution of a family over adoption, dead time raised to an untapped level of musical elegance in a narrative film, and a practical mise-en-scène that focuses warmly on the actor).

The effort to categorize Vengenace is Mine by its first 2022 viewers on the film social media site Letterboxd (it's Bergmanesque! it's Cassavetes! it's Altmanesque! it's a trauma caper! it's a tragicomedy about fucked-up families!) reminded me of United Artists' failed effort to promote The Night of the Hunter upon its initial 1955 release. A sisters' melodrama that would have once been dialed way up in the 40s and starred Bette Davis with her scheming bulge of eyes — is dialed way back, in 1984, thanks to Brooke Adams and her low-key, burbling survivor's stare. It does something unparalleled which an unimaginative mind will dismiss as too-frenetic plotting: it spends the first 40 minutes weaving together no less than 10 different soap-type narrative strands that have little immediate relation (we think) to the 11th strand which becomes the key focus of the film: a situationship with the next-door neighbors that involves daughter abandonment, mental illness, desire that never pronounces itself, and the families we choose versus the families that are thrust upon us by tragic happenstance. But those first 40 minutes are key: that weave, that scramble, is Roemer's ingenious way of getting us into the shape of Brooke Adams's inner rut. She has no real home to return to, her ex-husband thinks they're together and manically waves around a pair of scissors to chop off Brooke's hair when she finally rejects him (in a psychotic outburst that will scare the hell out of you for its suddenness), her sister is a floating non-entity. But with total strangers, she has a chance to start again. With one particular stranger, Trish Van Devere, she seems to gain a new sister. But one always has to side-step the demons of the family that came before. And in all of the troubles with the new sister's mental collapse (which is neither dramatic nor outsized), siblinghood is fully realized. "Welcome to the family," as Timothy Spall says in the Leigh film. It's an anguished simmer; nothing happens until everything happens all at once. Once again, I was blown away. Later that week, I was asked by Jake and Bruce Goldstein, repertory director of Film Forum, to do a Q&A with Brooke Adams a week after I’d seen it for the first time. The experience was unforgettable and an indescribable joy. She was a bit nervous, said she didn’t have a good memory, and was not used to the spotlight. She turned to painting in her later years, and was at a painter’s retreat when a friend told her about the New York Times review by Wesley Morris praising Roemer’s film and her performance in it.

On the whole, the way Michael spoke of cinema was refreshing for me. He spoke of his practice with fervency, a matter of life and death. Much lip service is paid to this idea by a lot of enterprising young filmmakers, but for Roemer, this, I realized as I listened to him speak, was a concrete fact. Truffaut once said, “I am only interested in films that express either the joy or the agony of making cinema.” Roemer was, too — and the proof is in his films.

Michael Roemer arrived at a curious moment in American cinema. He is part of the independent movement, and the attempts of especially his confrère Robert Young to bring a new level of intelligence to American films, was unfolding parallel to both the New York underground, including the experimental film movement, and the efforts of John Cassavetes and Orson Welles to create a new type of narrative film that served as an alternative to the formulaic Hollywood system. But of course, Roemer’s aesthetic and interest were not exactly the same as Young’s. Roemer, for his art, was more interested in interpersonal relationships and the private rather than the public, more overtly “political” realm” — that is to say, what Roemer could personally confirm and “validate” (a favorite word of Michael’s). Young, by contrast, was surveying the wider political landscape of the United States, telling narratives about particular groups in America that were not being explored by the white capitalist mainstream. (See, for example, his stupendous Alambrista! and The Ballad of Gregario Cortez.) In that sense, Michael allied himself not only to cinema, but also towards the realms of literature and especially painting. One of his greatest confrères was Frank Auerbach, who came out of the London school of painting (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud). A longer study of Roemer would trace the influence that Auerbach and Roemer mutually had on each other’s works, particularly Auerbach on Roemer, who started out as a painter in youth.

When I was asked to come on board and serve as the editor for Michael’s memoirs, I was taken with a pleasant shock and surprise. Jake Perlin, knowing my enthusiasm for Michael’s work in my writings, had arranged for Michael to call me in early 2025 and see if I had any interest in reading his book and offering my thoughts. Not only did I have a keen interest, I was, I felt, ready to absorb his world with the knowledge of having seen his completed body of work; this had been only a few weeks after the joint-premiere of the new restorations of Michael’s last key works that had not received a release, Dying (1976) and Pilgrim Farewell (1980), both about the dying or soon-to-be-dead and how they respond to their impending fates. Michael had known that I was a deep appreciator not only of his films but also of his books, Telling Stories (1998) and Shocked But Connected: Notes on Comedy (2012), where he details his intricate, homegrown theories on narrative through myriads of literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples. I had also helped organize, along with the Yale Film Archive, the Whitney Humanities Center, and Jake Perlin — the appearance of Michael and Brooke Adams at Yale University in 2022; they were on hand to be in wonderful conversation on Vengeance is Mine (1984), moderated by Bilge Ebiri. Our dinner discussion afterwards, on Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, lingered with him, he told me later.

Since then, Michael and I called several times — in friendship and deep admiration — in preparation for our first round of edits, slated for Friday morning, May 23rd, 2025. The last time I spoke with him was Monday night, May 19th, 2025. I remember calling him rather unusually late — 9.30pm or so — but we remained on the line, speaking for a good hour or so. I told him I was worried I had gotten him when it was too late, and he dismissed my worries. He reiterated how my interest in his life galvanized him, and that he was looking forward to going through my suggestions for edits, however tentative. Michael already mentioned that he was not feeling quite right about the second half of the book, which had, up until then, been a loose collection of repetitious fragments of ideas. He needed to know where to cut. I said that the second half reminded me of the Stargate sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): whatever order existed before in his beloved narrative form broke off in this section into so many prismatic, colorful, ersatz shards. He laughed and agreed with my assessment — “well, let’s see if we can find some shape for them.” In any case, he said, “we can talk about this in detail on Friday.” I mostly spoke to him about what he had accomplished in the last few weeks; just the previous week, he had finished work on two screenplays, one of which emitted out of him “like a burp.” He sounded on top of the world, extremely chipper and happy, and in no pain.

When we hung up the phone that Monday, I had no idea of knowing that this would be one of Michael Roemer’s last conversations. He died the following day, Tuesday, May 20th.

Michael touched countless lives with his patience, wisdom, and relentless thirst for truth. His films and his teaching and his soon-to-be-released memoir are all a testament to that — and the reconsideration of what this life meant, not only against the history of American cinema but also in the larger sweep of the 20th century (which, chez Roemer, are one and the same), is just beginning. The depth of Michael’s engagement with the life around him, judging from one extraordinary letter addressed to a Danish student named Cecile, should give a robust picture of his life’s work. Here, Roemer provides a student with his life in miniature, as a letter written in the margins of an essay about life in college. He goes above and beyond what any average teacher would have, i.e., simply giving a letter-grade and passing the student with some perfunctory comments about continuing the great work, and he relates what is being taught in his course to experiences that the student has encountered in her life — and will continue to encounter long after they have passed the course and forgotten the syllabi. Forgive the length of the following excerpt; it is included in order to give a fuller sense of Michael’s deep care in people, from which he drew the insights of his art:

    Dear Cecile,

I was very interested in reading your essay. You describe the fear that hit you when you came to America as a radically new experience.

Growing up in Nazi Germany and in a Jewish family that was essentially German in its psychology and traditions, I grew up governed by fear. I was constantly expected to live up to standards and rules, and - unintentionally - made to feel inadequate and guilty. I withdrew into the world of fairy tales and myths, and stopped living in the utterly destructive real world.

Your essay allowed me to understand why Denmark and Norway behaved very differently from just about every other country under German domination during World War Two.

The way you are experiencing Yale made me think about my own experience at Harvard. Like you, though at the age of 17, I came to the United States from Europe. In 1939, after my Berlin childhood, I was put on a train with 300 other Jewish children, and spent the war years at Bunce Court -- a progressive coeducational boarding school for children, who had no parents or whose parents were in distant parts of the world. It was a wonderful place for many of us. Though it may have been a pedagogical principle also, it was economics --the school had no money, a single telephone, and a car that was up on blocks - forced us to do the work that maintained the school. The teachers were a mix of German Jews -- some had never taught before - and English conscientious objectors who couldn't find work in more patriotic English schools. The classroom atmosphere was necessarily relaxed, since we were not sorted into academically inclined and nonacademic students. There was no grading of any consequence, nor did the so-called bright students feel any different from those who never opened a book.

After my severe upbringing in Berlin and four years in a Berlin school under a homeroom teacher who hated my guts, I was suddenly free of my chains. I did absolutely no school work, spent my free time roaming the woods and fields in our part of Shropshire, and read just about every German novel and poetry collection in our small library. (In six years, I read a total of seven or eight books in English. I also put on plays, painted picture after picture, and wrote German poems.) The reports the school sent to family members in the United States invariably said that Michael could do much better — but nobody seemed to mind very much.

The last two years at school I buckled down in preparation for exams administered by Cambridge University and did well enough to get into Harvard when I came to the States. I'm sure that the reason I didn't flunk out despite the fact that I was miserable at College was that my childhood had prepared me to survive the very elements of American life that have shocked you.

I had been free of fear at Bunce Court, but had learned how to live with fear in Berlin — and now, that I was back in a pressure cooker, constantly graded, compared to others, and found wanting or just barely adequate, I was back at home — a home I knew how to survive. My motto was James Joyce's "Secrecy, exile and cunning. " I did the work the College required — well enough to keep my scholarship — but pursued my own agenda.

Harvard was anything but a community or home to me. I couldn't wait to leave - though the future was totally unclear. When I moved to New York to work in a film company --one of many lucky breaks — the sense of homelessness, of belonging nowhere, of being utterly alone that was so familiar to me was reinforced.

But there was one difference: I realized there were a great many others in the same boat. Even the secretaries at the office seemed desperately eager to connect, to belong, to turn the office into a family.

After two lonely years, a further and major lucky turn brought me together with Barbara — another orphan, albeit one from a Mennonite community in Minnesota. We found each other within minutes of meeting and were together for 56 years. Despite all kinds of difficulties and tensions, we constituted home for each other. Though it often imposed solitude on her, Barbara allowed me to do the work that had become my refuge — that gave me a sense that I exist and am not totally helpless, and even provided an occasional connection to others. Unfortunately much of my work has been a report from the trenches and most people, understandably, don't want to know what goes on in them.

    [….]

    I mistrust groups and communities inasmuch as they seem, inevitably, to include by excluding.

As for America — as I see it, it remains the great laboratory of the future. Viewed pessimistically, as in your essay, it is riddled by differences, violence, and anxiety. Seen optimistically, it may be an attempt — almost entirely unconscious — to arrive at a community composed out of differences. Whether this is possible would seem in doubt. Levi-Strauss doesn't think it is.

But if — in some distant and visionary future — we are to live in one world, perhaps generating a community of differences that don't undermine each other, don't feel mortally threatened by each other, and don't have to destroy each other, is the only way forward.

As for my own work, all I can say is that perhaps some person (young or old, and very likely a solitary traveler like so many of us) may come upon it and see that there is a path, a way of remaining alive and energized — and that others have traveled it. They are not altogether alone. Every community, even the most rigid and theocratic, counts on the individual to manage his or her inner world. Every community counts on what we call our free will. In my own perhaps too pessimistic view, the individual and his or her will are essentially mandated — or called into existence — by the community. Solitary travelers perform an essential service to the community by going their individual way. They seem to be outside the community, but they confirm it. The solitary traveler may not know it, but his journey is important.

Grade: A