There appears to be a consensus that this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna was exceptionally rich —so much so that I concluded that my next column in these pages could be devoted to some of its riches, most of which are already available on DVD or Blu-ray in one form or another. The most notable exceptions, at least among the newer films shown —Jean-Baptiste Péretié’s 2021 Jacques Tati, Tombé de la lune (not only the best documentary about Tati to date, but the only one to understand the basic fact that Tati essentially wrote his scripts with his body), and Mitra Farahani’s startling A vendredi, Robinson, a staged internet encounter between two nonagenarian New Wave pioneers, Jean-Luc Godard and Ebrahim Golestan, that encompasses their dialectically contrasting self-portraits — will hopefully become available in the near future, at which point their minor limitations (e.g., Péretié minimalizing the radicalism of Tati’s Parade [1974], Farahani over-maximalizing the radicalism of Godard in her own transgressive editing patterns) can also be discussed.
For the others, let me start by noting that two of my favourite Bologna discoveries are both available from Rarefilmsandmore.com for U.S. Read more
Written for Film Comment‘s web site in mid-August 2016. — J.R.
Although it isn’t widely recognized, Melbourne’s historical status as the cradle of online film criticism — as signaled by the founding of Screening the Past in 1997, Senses of Cinema in 1999, and Rouge in 2003 — remains a significant part of its film culture, so highly developed and serious that not once, during fourteen festival screenings, did I ever notice any viewers activating their mobiles. It’s equally evident that the pioneering web sites which helped to foster this kind of seriousness were neither accidental nor coincidental. All three were calculated gestures of outreach from a remote outpost to the rest of the world — allowing everyone a glimpse into a literary culture and a branch of cinematic savvy unhampered by the twang of regional accents or the pressure of imminent local releases. And as outreach gestures they no less clearly succeeded and flourished — so well, in fact, that their innovations and energies were quickly absorbed into the Internet mainstream without leaving behind many telltale markers of where they’d been nurtured. (If the Internet sometimes fosters historical blindness, this is especially true of the Internet’s own history.) Read more
On February 12, 2018, Ken Jacobs sent me the following email:
Dear Jonathan,
I first came upon writing on STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH a week ago. Sorry.
Appreciate what you had to say except, naturally, for your take on my Muslim comment. So I must’ve failed to make clear my despising of all religions with their bloody track records. I go so far as to consider the to-do about Nazis overblown: a momentary political organization that, employing Ford up-to-date industrial methods, accomplished the actual near-fulfillment/”final solution” to 2 000 years of strenuous Christian degradation, torture and outright slaughter of Jews. “Race” had just been invented maybe a century earlier but murdering Jews was an enduring Christian project. (Nor were Nazis killing any other “race”.) A fact to remember about WW2: Christians murdered Jews. A land war coupled to a religious “war” and the war they were allowed to win by USA as long as they could keep costing the Soviets. Don’t get me started….
I’m remembering one line in the film about “a bedtime story gone amok”. That is my take on these force-fed beliefs given helpless children wired up to believe, needing to believe if they’re to survive (“no, you can’t run into traffic”).
by James Morrison. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
190 pp. Hardcover: $75.00, Paperback: $19.95, and Ebook:
$17.95.
My admiration for and my demurrals about James Morrison’s brilliant monograph both begin on the first pages of his Introduction. He quotes the title subject of Mike Nichols: An American Master (2016) on the “froggy conspiracy” which elevates figures like Howard Hawks and Jerry Lewis at the expense of George Stevens, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann (“our greatest directors”), a statement that Morrison aptly compares to the vulgar parodies of existential beatniks in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face. Yet two pages later, when he calls Nichols “countable as one of the ‘auteurs’ who by common consent ushered in the New Hollywood,” Morrison seems to be indulging in aspects of the same parody, especially when one considers that he’s decided to suppress the information that Mike Nichols: An American Master is the work of a genuine auteur, Elaine May (coincidentally, Donen’s current partner), and not only because, unlike Nichols, she functions as a film writer as well as a film director. I presume that Morrison chose to suppress May’s involvement in this glib claptrap because it complicates his argument, especially when he goes on to show that Nichols’ tirade is seemingly bolstered by May’s montage of dumb quotes from Bosley Crowther about Bonnie and Clyde, and from Pauline Kael and Renata Adler about 2001, constituting what Morrison rightly calls “a slam against film criticism as such”. Read more
