This is a story, never before published, written during my first years of high school — most likely in 1958, when I was a sophomore. I’ve done some light editing. The illustrations, which I realize are not always consistent with one another or precisely congruent with the story, are all gleaned from the Internet. This story is the first in a series of three to be posted here, all fantasies and all written when I was in high school . — J.R.
The Tower
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
When I first woke up in the tower, I looked around, feeling strange and disoriented. I’d never been there before – never been anywhere before, as well as I can recall – and I’d just woken up, yet I’d never gone to sleep. I felt clean and fresh and wore plain clothes, but who was I, and what was I doing here?
I was in a small room that was empty except for the cot I was lying on and a chair. Read more
Barring only the one time I took over my father’s weekly promotional movie column in my home-town newspaper in March 1957 (briefly excerpted in my first book, Moving Places, on pp. 123-124), which doesn’t exactly count, this must be my first published film criticism, even though my name was misspelled. (The correct spelling was Jonny.) It appeared in The Stimulator, my biweekly high school newspaper (published at Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama), on October 16, 1958, when I was 15, a sophomore. Phil Stanford, incidentally, was a senior and good friend at the time. I’m nearly positive that the title wasn’t my own, and if this “column” had any sequels, I have yet to uncover them. (Esoteric footnote: “The Tri-Cities” in this period consisted of Florence, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia, before Muscle Shoals City grew, thanks to its recording studios, from the size of a modest speed trap, thereby yielding The Quad-Cities.) — J.R.
Front Row Center
By JOHNNY (sic) ROSENBAUM
This column, which will alternate with Phil Stanford’s, is to be devoted to reviews of movies, television programs, and the occasional plays put on in the Tri-Cities. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (July 10, 1992). For more on Endfield, see Brian Neve’s excellent new biography, The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu, as well as my subsequent Reader article about him and my essay “Pages from the Endfield File,” which grew out of the preceding two pieces and is reprinted in my 1997 collection Movies as Politics. This particular piece has been upgraded in terms of illustrations. — J.R.
FILMS BY CY ENDFIELD
The role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror. If the artist has a role, it is to confront people — and himself first of all — with this horror, this feeling that one has when one learns about the death of someone one has loved. — Jacques Rivette in an interview, circa 1967
Cyril Raker Endfield, who will turn 78 this November, is the sort of filmmaker auteurist critics like to call a “subject for further research.” To the best of my knowledge, he has directed 21 features — the first 7 in the United States between 1946 and 1951, the remainder in England, continental Europe, and South Africa between 1953 and 1971 — and worked on the scripts for most of them, as well as on the scripts of two Joe Palooka films (apart from the two he directed), a Bowery Boys picture (Hard Boiled Mahoney, 1947), Douglas Sirk’s Sleep My Love (1948), a prison picture called Crashout (1955), Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1958), and Zulu Dawn (1979), a sort of prequel to Endfield’s only hit, Zulu (1964). Read more
Bing Crosby stars as a carefree troubadour who settles down and helps to open a restaurant in order to keep his little friend (Edith Fellows) out of an orphanage; Madge Evans (Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!) is the skeptical social worker who gradually falls for him. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod, this Depression-era musical (1936) is hokey but likable, its cloying sentimentality made bearable by its casual but sincere populism. Louis Armstrong, who reunited with Crosby on-screen 20 years later in High Society, is just as wonderful here. 81 min. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader, November 1, 1987. — J.R.
Alan Rudolph’s movie begins promisingly: Mike (Tim Hutton), out of work in the mid-40s (in black and white), dies in an accident and finds himself in heaven (in color), where he’s greeted by his amiable Aunt Lisa (Maureen Stapleton), and shortly falls in love with Annie (Kelly McGillis), an unborn soul. Heaven here is rather like Ray Bradbury’s Mars, a site of nostalgic wish fulfillments, and if Rudolph and screenwriters Bruce A. Evans and Raymond Gideon had only remained there, the movie might have somehow sustained its fragile, otherworldly charm. But Annie leaves to be born on earth, and Mike, who’s allowed to be reborn, is given 30 years to find her again. Inexplicably, the film remains in color as it returns to earth; the new selves of Annie and Mike still look the same, but how they’re supposed to find one another with fresh identities and nearly blank memories is not made clear, and vagueness gradually gives way to muddleheadedness. Although a string of cameos by nonactors (including novelist Tom Robbins and various rock singers) leads to some awkward moments, Rudolph still shows some talent in handling professionals (such as Ann Wedgeworth and Don Murray, as well as the leads), though he’s invariably better off when directing his own scripts (e.g., Read more
Written for Cinema Guild’s Blu-Ray of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, released in mid-January 2015. — J.R.
Stray Dogs (2013), winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, is Tsai Ming-liang’s tenth theatrical feature. It was described by Tsai at its premiere as his last, and in many ways it’s his most challenging. Considered as the apotheosis of his film work to date — which also includes eleven telefilms made between 1989 and 1985, and ten shorts or segments of portmanteau features, culminating in the 2014, 56-minute Journey to the West – it constitutes a kind of nervy dare to the viewer, and to prime oneself for it, it might help to look at Journey to the West first.
Even though both films flirt with stasis, usually in the midst of extremely long takes, they’re also performance pieces that hark back to Tsai’s roots in experimental theater and television. And the performers are not only hired actors but also unsuspecting street pedestrians, places, weather conditions, the camera, and, perhaps most crucial of all, viewers watching the activity of all of the above. If Tsai’s films typically qualify as questions rather than answers, foremost among the questions is how we perform as spectators – a question that we’re obliged to pose in relation to all the materials offered. Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1984 (Vol. 51, No. 611). In retrospect, I’m rather proud of the synopsis here, which must have been a bitch to put together. -– J.R.
Colloque de chiens (Dogs’ Dialogue)
France, 1977
Director: Râúl Ruiz
Cert–AA. dist–BFI. p.c–Filmoblic/L’Office de la Création Cinématographique. p–Hubert Niogret. asst. d–Michel Such. sc–Nicole Muchnik, Raul Ruiz. ph—Denis Lenoir, Patrice Millet. In colour. still ph–Patrice Morère, Mario Muchnik. ed–Valeria Sarmiento. m–Sergio Arriagada. cost–Fanny Lebihan, Yves Hersen. sd. rec–Michel Villain. sd. re-rec–Paul Bertaud. English version/English commentary—Michael Graham. French version/French commentary–Robert Darmel. l.p–Eva Simonet, Silke Humel, Frank Lesne, Marie Christine Poisot, Hugo Santiago, Geneviève Such, Laurence Such, Michel Such, Pierre Olivier Such, Yves Wecker, the dogs of the Gramont refuge. 1,938 ft. 22 mins. (35 mm.)
The film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and the following story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen: Monique discovers in a school playground that the woman she believes to be her mother isn’t her mother. At home, she learns that her real mother is a woman named Marie, who doesn’t know who her father was. Read more
Conversations conducted for Movie Mutations and Abbas Kiarostami (both 2003). — J.R.
Open Spaces in Iran and Africa:
Conversations with Abbas Kiarostami
by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
1. Taste of Cherry: spring 1998 (Chicago)
The hero of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry is a 50ish man named Mr. Badii contemplating suicide for unstated reasons, driving around the hilly Tehran outskirts in search of someone who will bury him if he succeeds — he plans to swallow sleeping pills — and retrieve him from the hole in the ground he has selected if he fails. Over the course of one afternoon, he picks up three passengers and asks each of them to perform this task in exchange for money — a young Kurdish soldier stationed nearby, an Afghan seminarian who is somewhat older, and a Turkish taxidermist who is older than he is. The soldier runs away in fright, the seminarian tries to persuade him not to kill himself, and the taxidermist, who also tries to change his mind, reluctantly agrees, needing the money to help take care of his sick child. The terrain Badii’s Range Rover traverses repeatedly, in circular fashion, is mainly parched, dusty, and spotted with ugly construction sites and noisy bulldozers, though the site he’s selected for his burial is relatively quiet, pristine, and uninhabited. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 18, 1987). — J.R.
All of James Benning’s features can be regarded as shotgun marriages in which he attempts to wed his distinctive formal talents and interests — framing midwestern landscapes with beauty and nostalgia, using ambiguous offscreen sounds to create narrative expectations — with an intellectual and/or social rationale. Landscape Suicide is almost certainly his most successful and interesting foray in this direction since his One Way Boogie Woogie of ten years ago. Delving into two murder cases — Bernadette Protti’s seemingly unmotivated stabbing murder of another teenage girl in a California suburb in 1984, and Ed Gein’s even more gratuitous mass slayings and mutilations in rural Wisconsin in the late 50s — Benning uses actors to re-create part of the killers’ court testimonies, juxtaposed with the commonplace settings where these crimes took place. Boldly eschewing the specious psychological rhetoric that usually accompanies accounts of such crimes, he creates an open forum for the spectator to contemplate the mysterious vacancy of these people and these places, and their relationships to each other. The performances of both actors, Rhonda Bell and Elian Sacker, are extraordinary achievements, and the chilling, evocative landscapes have their own stories to tell; the fusion of the two creates gaps that not even the film’s confusing title can fill, but the space opened up is at once powerful and provocative. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 1, 1987). — J.R.
Judging from this interminable Australian punk film, the 1978 freak scene in Melbourne was almost identical to that in London a decade earlier, with one important difference: politics in this motley crash pad are so marginalized that they barely squeak into the movie as incidental comic relief. Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there’s probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986. The house where all the layabouts lay about belongs to Sam (Michael Hutchence), lead singer for the rock band Dogs in Space, and in order to justify the title further, period snatches of TV coverage of astronauts are arbitrarily cut into the proceedings. Boredom is counter-revolutionary, reads a prominently placed placard, but the boredom in this case — scarcely alleviated by the ‘Scope format and a few intermittent flashy visual effects — isn’t even focused enough to seem moderate. The Dolby music in the film is written and performed by Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, the Marching Girls, Chuck Rio, Gang of Four, and Boys Next Door; other actors include Saskia Post, Nique Needles, Deanna Bond, Tony Helou, and Chris Haywood. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 26, 1987). — J.R.
John Huston devoted the better part of his career to a sort of intelligent second-degree cinema predicated on the adaptation of literary worksa practice informed by crafty casting and fluid storytelling, but often limited by the fact that his attraction to heavyweights (The Maltese Falcon, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby-Dick, The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, and Under the Volcano, among others) guaranteed faithful reductions at best. His last film (1987), which adapts the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, represents the apotheosis of this position — isolating the story from the rest of Dubliners (which gives it much of its resonance) and most of its perfectly composed language, and then doing his best with what remains. Scripted by his son Tony and starring his daughter Anjelica, the film hews to the original plot and much of the dialogue. The results are leagues ahead of Joseph Strick’s unfortunate Joyce adaptations, but inevitably leagues behind the original story. That said, the film’s concentrated simplicity and purity achieve a kind of perfection. The uniformly superb cast includes Donal Donnelly, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, Ingrid Craigie, Frank Patterson, Dan O’Herlihy, and Donal McCann as Gabriel Conroy; the lilting Irish flavor is virtually decanted, and Fred Murphy’s gliding camera movements are delicately executed. Read more
From Sight and Sound (Spring 1987). –- J.R.
The Rotterdam Festival is gradually expanding in scope and attendance, while its survival seems to become increasingly polemical and precarious. Now in its 16th edition, the festival continues to honor its director Hubert Bals’ stubborn, utopian precept that, ‘An audience should be found for a film, not a film for an audience.’
Thus, while Libération critic Serge Daney was lecturing persuasively on the growing impossibility of critics mediating between films and audiences, it was possible to watch a videotape, Joan Does Dynasty, in which New York critic Joan Braderman, with the aid of Manuel De Landa’s computer graphics, does precisely that for the TV series.She appears in front of Dynasty in different sizes, shapes and positions, from diverse angles and with varying degrees of transparency, and delivers an exuberant, madcap critique of the show. Part of a cycle of low-budget, leftist media critiques known as Paper Tiger Television which appears on us public access cable and boasts more than a hundred titles in its catalogue, Braderman’s pungent intellectual stand-up is the likely formal masterpiece of a variable, slapdash series ranging from the unfocused and obvious (Peter Wollen on the U.S. Read more
