Daily Archives: May 23, 2024

An interview with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: “I’m trying to do something aesthetic through criticism”

by David Walsh

From the World Socialst Web Site [wsws.org], January 6, 2020. I’m very grateful for the seriousness and care that David Walsh brought to this interview. — J.R.

I recently spoke to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the longtime and widely respected film critic for the Chicago Reader and author of numerous books on filmmaking. He has been writing about cinema and cultural life since the 1960s. His latest effort is a two-volume work, with the overall title of Cinematic Encounters, published by the University of Illinois Press. The first volume (November 2018) is subtitled Interviews and Dialogues, the second (June 2019) Portraits and Polemics. The books consist of essays, interviews and reviews covering several decades.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in Paris, 2017

Rosenbaum was born in Florence, Alabama in 1943. His grandfather owned and operated a small chain of movie theaters in the South, including one in Florence. Remarkably, Rosenbaum was raised in a house designed for his parents by the illustrious architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In a memoir, the critic describes himself during his youth as “an Alabama moviegoer who largely grew up in my family’s movie theaters.”

The convulsions produced by the civil rights movement and other social struggles clearly influenced Rosenbaum, as they did many members of his generation. Read more

On PROVIDENCE

From Cinema Scope issue 39, Summer 2014. — J.R.

 

PROVIDENCE DVD

I shelled out $56.19 in US dollars (including postage) to acquire the definitive and restored, director-approved DVD of Providence (1977) from French Amazon, and I hasten to add that this was money well spent. Notwithstanding the passion and brilliance of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Providence is in many ways my favourite of his longer works, quite apart from the fact that it’s the only one in English. And I can’t ascribe this preference simply to the contribution of David Mercer (1928-1980). I recently resaw the only other Mercer-scripted film I’m familiar with, Karel Reisz’s Morgan!,  and aside from the wit of its own sarcastic dialogue I mainly found it just as flat and tiresome as I did in 1966, for reasons that are well expounded in Dwight Macdonald’s contemporary review (reprinted in his collection On Movies).

 

I haven’t yet been able to see The Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter), Resnais’ swan song, but clearly part of what gives Providence even more resonance now, writing less than a month after Resnais’ death, is the theme it shares with his penultimate feature, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2013): an old writer facing his own death, and trying to create some form of art in relation to it. Read more