The Complete Films of Agnes Varda (Criterion, Blu-Ray)
Thunderbolt (Kino Lorber, DVD & Blu-Ray)
I contributed half an audiocommentary (with James Naremore) to Citizen Kane that I haven’t yet heard (Sight and Sound’s deadline precedes its release by two weeks), but I’ve already been able to see and hear The Complete ‘Citizen Kane’ (1991)–a BBC documentary included in the package–that alone warrants my inclusion of this release here, ‘conflict of interest’ be damned. I’m also very much looking forward to hearing the audiocommentaries on Alias Nick Beal and Night Has a Thousand Eyes (both from Kino Lorber),by Eddie Muller and Imogen Sara Smith, respectively.
Simon Petri-Lukács conducted the following online interview with me, about 5,000 words long, and requested that I post it here.(I’m sorry that many or most of Simon’s links as given no longer work, but many can be reached via my site’s search engine.) In fact, it’s an extended sequel to the in-person interview that he did with me in the lobby of my hotel in Budapest when I briefly visited that city in February 2022; the photo below shows us there and then, with a couple of friends. I’ll let Simon take over from here. — J.R.
I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum back in February when he visited Budapest. Then, I asked him to be the Jewish Museum’s special Skype-guest later this year and to have a discussion about Elaine May, following her first ever retrospective in Hungary. Because of the pandemic, of course, the retrospective had to be postponed. This interview covers, among other things, the topic of our cancelled Q&A. Furthermore, it offers a broader look at Jonathan’s favorite comedies and his opinions on Jewish stereotypes in American films. It also includes a discussion of his 1997 book, Movies as Politics and the role of literature in his life.
One thing I regretfully forgot last time was to recommend certain works of Jonathan which are available to everyone on this website – except for those periods when he circulates certain articles, but sooner or later they’ll all be there. Read more
It’s disconcerting that the collected writings in English of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers currently sells for $852 on Amazon — or a whopping $980, if you opt for the paperback — while the only American book about him downgrades his work’s artistic value in its very title (Vance Kepley’s 1985 In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko). Look him up on Wikipedia, and you find that his name is shared by a poker player and a psychiatrist — hardly fit company for the epic, poetic Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956), a pagan mystic whose masterful films look as wildly experimental, as dreamlike, as hysterically funny, as fiercely tragic, and as beautiful today as they did a century ago.
A Cold War casualty, often defined in the West as a Russian Communist and in Russia as a turncoat, this Ukrainian nationalist lived under KGB surveillance for most of his life — which may help to explain why his devoted second wife Julia Solntseva, who filmed many of his unrealized scripts after his death, had joined the KGB herself, possibly in order to protect her husband. And as one of his better Western explicators, Ray Uzwyshyn, has pointed out, “With regard to the non-Russian republics (i.e. Read more
A catalog entry for Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2021, put together from three other texts of mine. — J.R.
F FOR FAKE
The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released during his lifetime (the lesser-known 1979 Filming ‘Othello’ was the second), this breezy, low-budget montage – put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles – forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself implied, an equally accurate title for this playful cat-and-mouse game might have been It’s All Lies.
The main subjects here are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Welles himself; and the name of the game is the practice and meaning of deception. Some commentators have speculated that this film was Welles’s indirect reply to Pauline Kael’s subsequently disproven contention that he didn’t write a word of the Citizen Kane script; his sly commentary here – seconded by some of the trickiest editing anywhere – implies that authorship is a pretty dubious notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market. For a filmmaker who studiously avoided repeating himself and sought always to remain a few steps ahead of his audience’s expectations, thereby rejecting any obvious ways of commodifying his status as an auteur, Welles arguably found a way in F for Fake to contextualize large portions of his career while undermining many cherished beliefs about authorship and the means by which “experts,” “God’s own gift to the fakers,” validate such notions. Read more
