My column for the abril 2018 issue of Caiman Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.
“I personally can’t define the difference between a documentary and a narrative film,” Abbas Kiarostami once said to me, adding that he considered the difference between a good movie and a bad one more important. I would further note that films that blur distinctions between documentary and fiction, including Kiarostami’s, are sometimes better because they do so. This was recently brought home to me when I belatedly discovered that one of my favorite films of 2017, Heinz Emigholz’s Streetscapes [Dialogue], wasn’t a scripted restaging in Uruguay of the filmmaker’s psychoanalysis with its two original participants, as I had naïvely assumed, but a scripted restaging with an American actor and an Argentinian filmmaker — a discovery that made the film even more provocative and impressive.
When I start to reflect on the widely different ways in which documentaries and fictional narratives are shown and marketed, I begin to realize that obfuscating such issues are often marketing decisions, much as obfuscating distinctions between art and politics often turn out to be. As I suggested in my last column, while decrying the public indifference to Harvey Weinstein’s artistic crimes, this is business as usual in current transatlantic discourse — a recognition that Weinstein’s sexual crimes are “commercial” and his artistic crimes “non-commercial”. Read more
From Cineaste (December 2001).
For a long time, I hesitated about reprinting this, but learning about Ray Carney’s unspeakable treatment of filmmaker Mark Rappaport (as detailed here) eliminated my compunctions.
For more about Rappaport’s work, here are three of the many links on this site:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2014/05/40758/
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/05/mark-rappaport-2/
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2015/04/recommnded-viewing-mark-rappaports-i-dalio/
— J.R.
Cassavetes on Cassavetes
Edited by Ray Carney. London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2001. 526 pp., illus. Paperback: $25.00.
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies
by Ray Carney. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 322 pp., illus. Paperback: $24.95.
John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity
by Ray Carney. Second Edition. Walpole, MA: Company C Publishing, 2000. 64 pp., illus. Paperback: $15.00.
Shadows
by Ray Carney. London: British Film Institute (BFI Film Classics), 2001. 87 pp., illus. Paperback: $12.95.
John Cassavetes: Lifeworks
by Tom Charity. London, New York and Victoria: Omnibus Press, 2001. 257 pp., illus. Paperback: $19.95.
As nearly as I can remember, I had two opportunities to meet John Cassavetes in the flesh, both times in New York, and I deliberately passed on both of them. Shortly after Faces came out in the mid-Sixties, a friend from my home town in Alabama who worshipped that film even more than I did — Shadows was still my own favorite then — came to town and found a way of contacting and then going to meet his idol, who was preparing Husbands at the time; he invited me to come along, and I declined. Read more
