Originally written as the tenth chapter of my book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), this is also reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. Because of the length of this essay, I’m posting it in two installments – J.R.

3. The taboo against financing one’s own work. I assume it’s deemed

acceptable for a low-budget experimental filmmaker to bankroll his or

her own work, but for a “commercial” director to do so is anathema

within the film industry, and Welles was never fully trusted or respected

by that industry for doing so from the mid-forties on. This pattern

started even before Othello, when he purchased the material he had

shot for It’s All True from RKO with the hopes of finishing the film

independently, a project he never succeeded in realizing. As an

overall principle, he did something similar in the thirties when he

acted in commercial radio in order to surreptitiously siphon money

into some of his otherwise government-financed theater productions

during the WPA period, a practice he discusses in This Is Orson

Welles. John Cassavetes, who also acted in commercial films in order

to pay for his own independent features, suffered similarly in terms of

overall commercial “credibility,” which helps to explain why he and

Welles admired each other. Read more

Originally written as the tenth chapter of my book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), this is also reprinted in my 2007 collection Discovering Orson Welles. Because of the length of this essay, I’ll be posting it in two installments – J.R.

Nothing irritates one more with middlebrow morality than the perpetual needling of great artists for not having been  greater.

— Cyril Connolly

During my almost thirty years as a professional film critic,

I’ve developed something of a sideline — not so much by

design as through a combination of passionate interest and

particular opportunities — devoted to researching the work

and career of Orson Welles. Though I wouldn’t necessarily

call him my favorite filmmaker, he remains the most

fascinating for me, both due to the sheer size of his talent, and

the ideological force of his work and his working methods.

These continue to pose an awesome challenge to what I’ve been

calling throughout this book the media-industrial complex.

In more than one respect, these two traits are reverse sides of

the same coin. A major part of Welles’s talent as a filmmaker

consisted of his refusal to repeat himself — a compulsion to

keep moving creatively that consistently worked against his

credentials as a “bankable” director, if only because banks rely

on known quantities rather than on experiments. Read more

Posted By Jonathan Rosenbaum on 12.29.06 at 08:00 AM

From the April 18, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

I was slow to appreciate the multifaceted greatness of the late Stan Brakhage, this country’s major experimental filmmaker, in part because he and some of his supporters originally presented his work in terms so grand they seemed to split his audience into believers and atheists. This memorial screening of ten Brakhage films, the prints of which were all loaned by local enthusiasts, extends from Desistfilm (1954) to Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999), and though it omits two of my favorites from his middle period — The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971) and Scenes From Under Childhood (1970) — it offers a useful 75-minute survey for people unacquainted with his work. For me the real revelations are the 90s films: the breathtaking The Chartres Series (1994), the self-avowed “last testament” Commingled Containers (1996), which marked Brakhage’s return to photography after years of painting directly on celluloid, and the literally dazzling Stately Mansions Did Decree. All three exhibit the same painterly brilliance found in his Ellipses Reels 1-4 (1998), and taken as a whole they suggest an overall development from chamber pieces to grand orchestral works. Completing the survey are Mothlight (1963), Door (1971), The Riddle of Lumen (1972), The Roman Numeral Series III (1980), Egyptian Series (1983), and I…Dreaming (1988), the latter one of his rare sound/image experiments. Read more

Go here for many more choices. — J.R.

Top Blu-ray Releases of 2018:

1. Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966); UK, Second Run

2. The Adventures of Hajji Baba (Don Weis, 1954); Twilight Time

3. The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969); UK, Second Sight

4. An Actor’s Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963); Criterion

5. The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923); Kino Lorber

6. Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948); Criterion

7. The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954); UK, Masters of Cinema

8. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995); Criterion

9. This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, Gunther von Fritsch, 1952); Flicker Alley

10. Figures in a Landscape (Joseph Losey, 1970); France, Carlotta Films

Top 5 Box Set Releases of 2018 :

1. Liebelei & Lola Montez (Max Ophuls, 1933 & 1955); Munich Filmmuseum; PAL, Germany

2. Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (David Lynch, 2017 ); Paramount*

3. Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood; Criterion

4. Clouzot: Early Works; Kino

5. Early Hou-Hsiao-Hsien: THREE FILMS 1980-1983; UK, Masters of Cinema

*As DVD Beaver points out, this actually was released in 2017. I selected it anyway because it was the best bargain of the year.

  Read more

Written for the Library of America’s web site The Moviegoer. The version published there on May 3, 2017  differs somewhat from the original version posted here, especially the ending. — J.R.

No less than seven features to date have been based on works by Philip Roth, and three of these have been directed by first-timers, all of whom previously made their cinematic mark in other professional capacities. Ernest Lehman (1915-2005) had a long and distinguished screenwriting career before directing his own adaptation of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1972, and Ewan McGregor acted in over four dozen features before directing American Pastoral 44 years later. James Schamus, a film professor at Columbia University, had over fifty producing credits — plus writing and producing credits on all but three of Ang Lee’s features — before he added direction to his producing and writing on Indignation. This has yielded what Stephen Holden in the New York Times has called “easily the best film made of a Roth novel, which is saying a lot.”

Schamus’s dexterity in navigating both commercial film production and academia has served him well on this project, enabling him to honor his source while rendering it both accessible and personal. Read more

From the Boston Phoenix (September 15, 1989). — J.R.

This enjoyable documentary about American comic books takes up a subject so fruitful and entertaining, it’s surprising no one has ever made such a film before. Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann — whose previous cultural investigations include feature-length documentaries about avant-garde jazz (Imagine the Sound) and North American poets who sing and chant their works (Poetry in Motion), and who is currently preparing a feature about the Twist — dives into his chosen turf with the zeal and affection of a voracious fan.

Starting out with the inception of comic books, in 1933, Mann gives us breezy surveys of the superheroes (such as Superman, Batman, and the Fantastic Four), EC Comics (which produced the best horror and sci-fi comics in the 50s and spawned the original version of Mad), the underground artists (such as Robert Crumb and Spain Rodrigues) who emerged in the 60s, and more recent figures such as Art Spiegelman, Sue Coe, and Lynda Barry, as well as the deliberations and operations of Raw, a contemporary publicatiin with a somewhat more self-conscious notion of the comic book as art.

Some of Mann’s funniest material is archival footage of anti-comic-book propaganda from the 50s, when Dr.

Written for the Chicago Reader (October 12, 2017). — J.R.

Golden Years

Nos Années Folles, the French title of this exquisitely upholstered and mysteriously provocative period drama, means “Our Crazy Years.” But as writer-director André Téchiné has suggested in such masterpieces as Wild Reeds and Thieves, being “crazy” simply means being human, alive, and horny. The protagonist (Pierre Deladonchamps), a passionately heterosexual soldier, disguises himself as a streetwalker to escape combat in World War I, then continues to wear drag in peacetime, yet his behavior seems no less rational (to him or to us) than that of little boys playing at war, or his adulterous wife (Céline Sallette) playing at marriage. For better and for worse, the mysteries remain unsolved and Téchiné’s elliptical tragic poetry prevails. —Jonathan Rosenbaum

Read more