Written in response to the following invitation from Diego Moldes Gonzalez(whom I’ve never met) in Madrid: “What is the definition of ‘culture’ for you? How is the culture of the 21st century similar and different from the culture of the 20th century?” — J.R.
As a beneficiary of both Internet culture and the imperial culture of the United States (which becomes imperial whenever it vainly calls itself American culture, which is often, thus implicitly appearing to enfold much of North America and all of South and Central America as secondary satellites), I continue to be subject to the market-driven capitalist culture that strives to pick the pocket of my unconscious and thereby invisibly steer my purchases (or, more precisely, the events that constitute my being purchased), defined as my existential identity. Thus, because I’m defined as an anti-Trumpian, the media fills me with anti-Trump rather than the desired absence or disappearance of Trump. In other words, Trumpians and anti-Trumpians get served two alternate versions of the same exclusive diet of Trump and daily coronavirus casualty figures, popularly known as the daily news, and choosing between these two unvarying diets is being deceptively labeled a form of democratic choice and a representative form of “American culture”. Read more
I’ve never thought that Nunnally Johnson’s Black Widow (1954), a New York whodunit in 2.55:1 CinemaScope, was a masterpiece, either at the age of 11 when I saw it in first-run or tonight, when I saw it on Twilight Time’s Blu-Ray, even if it held my interest both times, and even moved me at times (especially Reginald Gardiner’s character and performance). But I have to admit that the single thing I found most memorable about it in 1954 — the brassy yet awkward sort of intermission grinding the story to a halt in the eleventh hour in order to dare or challenge the audience to solve the mystery before the movie itself does — is oddly missing from the Blu-Ray.
Is this because 20th Century-Fox decided to delete this intertitle at some later date, or because Twilight Time decided it was too corny to keep? I hope it’s the former, because this label is usually pretty scrupulous about history and sticking to original versions, and indeed, part of what makes this movie watchable now (if not then) is how outlandishly dated it all is — its embarrassment about an unmarried woman’s pregnancy (which oddly places her boyfriend of roughly the same age completely beyond suspicion when she winds up murdered), its totally implausible bitch-goddess mythology (which Peggy Ann Garner can’t be blamed for, given the lines that writer-director Johnson handed her), its equally overdone diva misogyny (which Ginger Rogers arguably makes even worse than it has to be), the bored indifference of both script and direction shown towards Gene Tierney as the dutiful spouse, the goody two-shoes rectitude of Van Heflin playing Van Heflin, and the sheer palatial breadth of its Manhattan apartments (cf. Read more
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
From the Chicago Reader (September 8, 1995). — J.R.
Arabian Knight
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Richard Williams
Written by Williams and Margaret French
With the voices of Vincent Price, Matthew Broderick, Jennifer Beals, Eric Bogosian, Toni Collette, and Jonathan Winters
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
No stars (Worthless)
Directed by Beeban Kidron
Written by Douglas Carter Beane
With Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Arliss Howard, Jason London, and Chris Penn.
It might be argued that a talent for abstract thought defines the radically different achievements of Arabian Knight and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. In Arabian Knight–a wildly imaginative and somewhat delirious animated feature that’s reportedly been in the works for over a quarter century — it’s a talent for graphic abstraction, a talent that is its own reward; this movie takes the highly dangerous step of pursuing formal beauty above all else, story and characters be damned. By contrast, in To Wong Foo — a terribly written, terribly directed, terribly designed, and for the most part terribly acted (if nobly intentioned) comedy –i t’s a talent for pure concept: three drag queens driving from New York to Hollywood enlighten bigoted middle Americans on the subjects of style and beauty. Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1975, Vol. 42, No. 500.
It’s good to see Norman Mailer’s first three features just out in a two-disc DVD set from Eclipse (it would be great if Criterion could eventually do the same for Susan Sontag’s three fiction features), even though I regret that my two favorite Mailer films — his untitled, ten-minute experimental short from 1947 (recently discovered by archivist Michael Chaiken, who wrote the excellent and provocative notes for the Eclipse set, and which I saw last July at Il Cinema Ritrovato) and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) — aren’t included. (Admittedly, I haven’t yet seen all of Maidstone, which Chaiken makes the most claims for, so these rankings on my part are still subject to revision.)…In his Eclipse notes, Chaiken describes Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? [sic] as “a filmed counterpart to The Armies of the Night“, which parallels my own observation here.Read more
Written by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, Jon Povill, and Gary Goldman
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, Mel Johnson Jr., and Marshall Bell.
The most influential SF movies of the past two decades are still very much with us, not only as landmarks but as continuing influences on newer release. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) gave us a whole slew of standbys, from the use of familiar brand names in outer space to a sense of visual design that, as critic Annette Michelson once put it, dissolved the very notion of the “special effect” as it was previously understood. In 1977 Star Wars popularized the notion of SF adventure as continuous action; and Close Encounters of the Third Kind the same year brought a certain pop religiosity (or perhaps one should say pseudoreligiosity) back to the genre, a combination of De Mille and Disney that sanctified Spielberg lighting as a means of bestowing halos on deserving characters, creatures, or locations.
Alien (1979) revitalized the claustrophobic horror-film dynamics of The Thing (1951), internalizing the monstrous and echoing David Cronenberg’s feature of 1975, They Came From Within. Read more
If you have to pay for reading this, it’s worth it. Curing what ails us always begins with facing it squarely, and both Ana Marie Cox and Naomi Klein provide excellent and positive advice about how and where to start. [10/1/2023]
Written for the Abril 2012 issue of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.
Nick was a gambler — a gambler who often lost.
— Susan Ray in Don’t Expect Too Much
One of the paradoxes of Nicholas Ray’s legend is that in order for it to function, he can’t be regarded simply as either a Hollywood director or as a struggling maverick, but as both. Seen exclusively as the former, he becomes the faceless but coherent and competent metteur en scene of A Woman’s Secret (1949) or Flying Leathernecks (1951). Seen exclusively as the latter, he becomes the personal but incoherent auteur of We Can’t Go Home Again (1973).
A similar problem has informed the career of Ray’s most important disciple, Jean-Luc Godard, another tormented romantic widely regarded as a leftist visionary when he made La chinoise and Week End in 1967, when his work was still sufficiently close to commercial cinema to reflect some of its slickness and glamour. But following May 1968, once he deliberately divested himself of that slickness and glamour and his films had to be judged on their political insights and their political utility alone, he was no less appropriately regarded as misguided and obtuse. Read more
These program notes for a John Cassavetes retrospective in July 1980 were commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Department, which as I recall edited them fairly substantially. (My subsequent “review” of the retrospective for The Soho News, “The Tyranny of Sensitivity,” is already available on this site.) I no longer have the unedited version, but I’ve tweaked this version in a few spots for style as well as factual accuracy without altering any of its opinions, some of which I might no longer share. -– J.R.
JOHN CASSAVETES, FILMMAKER AND ACTOR
June 20–July 11, 1980
“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” the cornball anthem that sounds so memorably through the final moments of Cassavetes’ THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, might be a fair enough theme song for what his contribution to movies is all about: a radical commitment to people that goes beyond mere thought.
His attitude is one that often has been difficult to grasp, for in over three decades as director, writer, and actor, he has seldom encouraged, or even allowed, a detached appraisal.For someone like me, who grew up watching his performances in films and live TV dramas in the fifties before experiencing the raw shock and revelation of SHAD0WS in 1961, a disinterested account of what that shock meant is perhaps impossible. Read more
LES IDOLES, Marc’O’s film version of his theater piece, originally opened in Paris in May, 1968, when many of its spectators were out in the street and presumably had other things to think about. It was released again early this year; but after a nominal run in one of several new mini-cinemas that have springing up lately all over the Left Bank, it seemed to vanish into oblivion a second time, only to re-emerge in a neighborhood house in early February, where it is currently playing. Talent does usually seem to find a way to reassert itself. Marc’O’s sarcastic parody about the making and merchandising of pop has nothing particularly profound or original to “say” about its subject, but it happens to have three of the liveliest performances in the modern French cinema.
Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, and Pierre Clementi, as the three pop stars, dive into their parts with such enthusiasm and expertise that the screen comes alive with their electric energies, and one can only speculate on how much more spectacular they must have been on the stage. (Despite some clever attempts at adaptation, LES IDOLES stubbornly remains another variant of filmed theater — a good thing to have, under the circumstances, but like Shirley Clarke’s ingenious recording of THE CONNECTION, it cannot really offer an equivalent to the excitements of a live performance.)Read more
