“We can bet that this film will be a flop,” blurbed Jean Eustache about his fellow post-New-Wave underachiever and pal Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), an early exercise in self-scrutiny coauthored by Moullet’s partner Antoinetta Pizzorno. “That’s the best for me: I’ll plunder it more easily.” In comparable fashion, a 1964 commercial flop made by one of the masters of both Eustache and Moullet, Jean-Luc Godard — who incidentally had helped to launch the careers of both of these disciples — was successfully plundered by Jim Jarmusch twenty years later in Stranger Than Paradise. More specifically, Jarmusch appropriated a black-on-white principle exploited by Godard mostly in interiors to depict a deadbeat trio of two male lowlifes secretly smitten by a foreign female while planning their inept capers in drab surroundings — Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, and Anna Karina (a Dane in France) in Band of Outsiders; John Lurie, Richard Edson, and Eszter Balint (a Hungarian in the U.S.) in Stranger Than Paradise. The white void seen here by Jarmusch’s trio in a suburban Ohio snowscape, subsequently replicated by a white void in a suburban Florida seascape, is mostly physical — unlike the metaphysical void faced by Godard’s trio in a Paris suburb, who have only movie clichés to fill their plans and imaginations.
For most of my life, I’ve been both haunted and baffled by a line in a popular song of the 50s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4X2RVm8R4Q), one of those just-plain-folks outbursts in which the male vocalist, nostalgically and wistfully reflecting on his wife in particular and his life in general, notes at one point that “our children numbered just about four”. Apart from the obvious need of a lyricist to fill out a line, I’ve been wondering for decades now what this could possibly mean. Virtually all the plausible explanations have dark implications: That the narrator never learned how to count up to four with any confidence; that he used to know how until either senility robbed him of that talent or Alzheimer’s gutted his memory; that he and his beloved actually birthed five children, two of whom were only half formed when they emerged (leading to his uncertainty about the precise number). All the possible answers to this query are decidedly grim, yet the song itself is indefatigably cheerful. [7-8-2020] Read more
Trevor Vartanoff, one of the frequenters of this web site, has come up with an invaluable gift to me and to others — an alphabetical master index of all (or almost all) the postings here, complete with links. “I found it useful,” Trevor just wrote me, “maybe you or readers will too.” (2021 postscript: sorry for the links here that no longer work.) — J.R.
This was published in the September-October 1995 issue of Film Comment, as a sidebar to https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/06/ambiguous-evidence-cozarinskys-cinema-indirect-tk/– J.R.
Partisan
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
As a member of the FIPRESCI jury at Berlin that gave this year’s Forum prize to Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 68-minute Citizen Langlois, I’d like to quote our citation: “For a brilliant essay revealing a multifaceted grasp of a major pioneer for whom cinema was the ultimate nationality.”
Indeed, at a time when much of what passes for film history is being regulated nationalistically, by state bureaucrats — a process observable in such projects as the British Film Institute’s “A Century of Cinema” series (which stepped off in Berlin with Edgar Reitz’s Night of the Directors), and in the blatantly pro-industry PBS miniseries calling itself American Cinema -– Cozarinsky’s film carries a distinct polemical charge. For Henri Langlois, the unruly and passionate founder/gatekeeper of the Cinémathèque Française spent his life railing against state bureaucracies, and most of his legacy would be unthinkable without this sustained resistance. His eclectic partisanship is more than adequately matched in a personal essay that is as much about exile as Cozarisnky’s One Man’s War and Sunset Boulevards.
Viewers looking for a comprehensive dossier may be as disappointed as the Gaullist bureaucrats were when they demanded strict accounts and an orderly catalog from Langlois. Read more
An exchange done via email for MUBI in November 2020. — J.R.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: What were the personal (or autobiographical) aspects of your film Farpões Baldios (Barbs, Wastelands), and what were the less personal aspects?
Marta Mateus: In any art, everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it? This film is based, first, on the experience and history of the people I grew up with, on the stories they shared with me since my childhood. These stories are in their hands, their gazes, in what binds us together, perhaps also in our blood and in our dreams. Landscapes also participate in it: it’s the source, the roots, a matter of fertility, hope, grief, shadow, solitude, birth, rebirth, joy, struggle. Therefore, there is also collective experience, historical memory and the landscape has its marked wounds, just like us. Thousands of years of exploitation, of nature and of man by man. There was a very clear route to follow, for us all, but no need to be spoken. Filming was a form of communion, in search of our other selves and each other–maybe a ritual, not “recreation” or narration but action. It was a very long process but made in a state of emergency; we only became aware of some things afterwards. Read more
A good reason for including the name of the original author in the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious version of the famous vampire story is that most previous film versions have been based not on the 1897 novel but on Hamilton Deane and John Balderston’s 1927 stage adaptation. This version, written by coproducer James V. Hart, brings back the multiple narrators of the novel, leading to a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded story line that remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy. (Some of this derives from the filmmakers’ musings about what was going on culturally in Europe at the turn of the century, including the decadent art of people like Beardsley, Klimt, and Huysmans and the birth of both movies and psychoanalysis.) Still the overreacher, Coppola suffers at times from a surfeit of ideas (rather than a dearth, like most of his colleagues); there are times when he squanders his effects (as he did in Rumble Fish), or finds some of them in unlikely places. (Murnau’s Faust has apparently exerted more of an influence than his Nosferatu, for instance.) But this is still the best vampire movie in ages — a visual feast with ideas, more disturbing than scary, though a rich experience in many other respects. Read more
From the Chicago Reader, June 18, 1993. (This is also reprinted in my 1997 collection Movies as Politics.) — J.R.
Who is correct? Are we becoming better off or worse off? Where are we heading? It depends on whom you mean by “we.” — Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations
“Men never get this movie,” a woman says to her friend in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, referring to Leo McCarey’s 1957 An Affair to Remember, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, which is showing on TV. In fact, we’re told this again and again. Another woman tearfully describes the last scene of An Affair to Remember to the hero, who remarks, “That’s a chick’s movie.” To clinch the point, female characters in this romantic comedy are repeatedly shown watching this movie and sobbing (as if the TV stations in Seattle and Baltimore, where most of the action takes place, showed little else), and men are never seen watching it at all. And just in case we’re left with any doubts about the matter, the review of Sleepless in Seattle in Variety assures us that An Affair to Remember‘s “squishy romantic elements appeal to women more than men.” Read more
This is the second and final part of an article published in the January-February 1975 Film Comment. — J.R.
Towards an aesthetic evaluation. For critics of the Thirties and the early Forties, Disney was an essential figure in the arts. Eisenstein declared him to be the most interesting filmmaker in America, and over the decade that followed, Erwin Panofsky praised the early cartoons and “certain sequences” in the later ones as “a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities”; Gilbert Seldes offered many sympathetic critiques; and even E.M. Forster published a brief tribute to Mickey Mouse. Lewis Jacobs’ assessment of Disney in The Rise of the American Film is certainly more likely to raise eyebrows today than it was in 1939:
“In the realm of films that combine sight, sound, and color Disney is still unsurpassed. The wise heir of forty years of film tradition, he consummates the cinematic contributions of Méliès, Porter, Griffith, and the Europeans [sic]. He has done more with the film medium since it added sound and color than any other director, creating a form that is of great and vital consequence not only for what it is but for what it portends. Read more
From Film Comment (January-February 1975). Although this is obviously dated in many respects, and most likely contains some errors, I’ve made only a few revisions while transcribing it. Given the length, I’ve decided to post this in two parts, with the second part to be posted later today.
This is a much-expanded entry written originally for Richard Roud’s two-volume Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980). It was mainly researched while I was still living in Paris in the mid-1970s, and I can recall having had lots of difficulties attending various kids-only screenings of Disney cartoon features, and convincing various theater managers that my interests were strictly scholarly and I wasn’t a dirty old man. — J.R.
In some respects, there may be no cultural figure in the West as potentially controversial as Walt Disney, even though love and hatred for what Disney represents are frequently felt by the same people. At the same time, there is certainly no other filmmaker whose aesthetic and ideological preoccupations have permeated so much of modern life that, paradoxically, his omnipresence verges on invisibility. Even beyond the grave, continuing manifestations of his vision have become some integral to American society that they are commonly regarded as natural and relatively unquestioned parts of the landscape, like a salt shaker or a babysitter or a place to go on vacation. Read more
This essay was commissioned in fall 2018 for an exhibition devoted to Michelangelo Antonioni in Tehran curated by Sami Astan. — J.R.
[Antonioni’s] trilogy was concerned with differing aspects of love as the medium of hope in our world.This film [Red Desert] is stripped to naked essence — hope or nonhope unadorned: the prospect of human life in the midst of whirling changes. We live,as we know, in the age of the swiftest transition inhistory, and all indications are that the speed ofchange will increase: in everything from householdappliances to concepts in philosophy, the whole architecture of thought. Antonioni seems to be saying, without effervescent cheeriness, that what was valuable can be preserved or can be transmuted to a new viability: that the future may contain new, at present inconceivable, values. — Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, March 23, 1963
There seems little doubt that Red Desert (1964) represented a major turning point in both the art and the career of Michelangelo Antonioni, and not only because it was his first film in color. Read more
An unfortunate danger of the journalistic mission to make radical art accessible through simplification is the possible removal of what makes it radical. Malcolm Cowley probably did more for William Faulkner’s reputation (with The Portable Faulkner in 1946) than anyone else did, but the occasional distortions this entailed also had some lasting and lamentable effects.
I haven’t yet read Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, which just arrived in the mail, but I’m astonished to discover that the novel I regard as Faulkner’s greatest, Light in August (1932 ) — in
part because it has the most to say about Southern racism — doesn’t appear even once in The Insider’s index. Back in my graduate school days in the mid-1960s, I discovered that Cowley’s excerpting of the murder and castration of Joe Christmas in The Portable Faulkner entailed identifying Christmas as a “negro” [sic], which Faulkner never does, because a central aspect of Christmas’s tragedy is that neither he nor the reader could ever know his racial identity, even though his murder and castration is motivated by a supposition that Cowley opted to share for the sake of journalistic “clarity” (i.e. simplification). This is one among many changes and editorial decisions Cowley submitted for Faulkner’s approval in a single letter, and Faulkner’s tacit acceptance was clearly an oversight, as evidenced by his subsequent statements about Joe Christmas to college students in Virginia.Read more
What’s the difference between being dead and being alive? The answer may seem obvious, but if one regards A.I. Artifcial Intelligence as a living work by a dead flmmaker – a revamping of Pinocchio to recount the heartbreaking fate of a boy robot programmed to love his human surrogate mother — the many paradoxes arising from this become far too significant to ignore. Even the fact that the credited director is Steven Spielberg, working from a Stanley Kubrick treatment, can be traced back to Kubrick’s own proposal, motivated by Spielberg’s capacity to direct a child actor more quickly than he could have done (specifcally, before the child could visibly age) and by Spielberg’s ability to handle certain kinds of emotion. And given the flm’s postulate that anyone’s life can become a living death, whether one happens to be a human being in a coma (Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton, whose infrmity and absence provoke his parents into buying a robot to replace him) or a robot who can outlive and outlast humanity (the remarkable Haley Joel Osment as David), the task of separating people from robots may turn out to be as diffcult as distinguishing life from death, ‘natural’ love from being programmed, or even the happiest Kubrick ending (the hero is granted, after centuries of waiting, his ultimate wish) from the bleakest and most absurdist of all (humanity’s fnal gasp takes the form of a programmed robot’s Oedipal wet dream).Read more
My contribution toThe Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929-1959, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht, and published this month to accompanythe Locarno Film Festival’s retrospective curated by Ehsan.
It’s fitting that Andre de Toth’s spikey, achronological, and boisterously all-over-the-place autobiography of 1994 lacks an index and is entitled Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. Given his wanderlust, the somewhat splintered career it produced, and his resistance to being pinned down by the expectations of others, it’s hardly surprising that recognition of de Toth as an auteur arrived only belatedly, at least in the English-speaking world, decades after the publication of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. Among the recipients in Fragments’ two pages of “dedications” are his seven wives (one of whom was Veronica Lake) and nineteen children or stepchildren, adding to the burgeoning list of all the people, forces, and inclinations that subdivided him, leading to many paradoxes as well as some confusions.
De Toth’s boastful account of his Hungarian childhood largely consists of descriptions of both the schools he got expelled from and the pranks leading to each of his expulsions. From the outset, he establishes himself as someone who loves to tussle, with friends as well as adversaries. Read more
Arguably, one of the more questionable and limited practices of film historians is the classifying of films and filmmakers according to a certain form of tribalism known as nationality. The problem with this admittedly convenient and obvious method of cataloging is that important elements–perhaps even essential ones–that elude or defy tribalism may get lost in the shuffle.
For starters, many of our greatest filmmakers – Chaplin, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Murnau, Renoir, Sirk, Stroheim, Welles — can’t be tied to a single country or tribe without being drastically oversimplified in the process. And even though most of what we call neorealism is Italian, this tends to overlook the fact that comparable examples can be found elsewhere in the world, not only in the 20th century but in the new millennium as well.
In the two short films that Nemes Jeles László made for the Inforg studio in 2007 and 2009, Try a Little Patience and The Counterpart, one can already find not only the same camera techniques, themes, and even emotions that will characterize his 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul — such as a mise en scène constructed in relation to close-ups, the experiences of a war prisoner, and a male adult’s feeling of tenderness towards a boy — but also, even more fundamentally, a sense of universality that goes beyond nationalism and tribalism. Read more
