Commissioned by the Belgian web site Cinetek and posted in December 2022.
Displacement in relation to language stands at thecenter of André Delvaux’s troubling and troubled Unsoir, un train (1968) — so precisely and so relentlesslythat even the disquiet created by the collision ofdisparate nouns in the poetic title (a time and aplace/ thing/vehicle, improbably yoked together like achance meeting between a sewing machine and anumbrella on a dissecting table) arguably becomes lost orat least diluted in its English translation. One Night… ATrain, by contrast, feels like the opening phrase in a familiar-sounding narrative, a prosaic flow of wordsthat accounts for the three- period ellipsis, continuance replacing collision. And somewhere in between this collision and this continuance is the sort of stasis or uncertainty of both time and place evoked by the Flemish title of the Johan Daisne novella that the film is loosely based on, De trein der traagheid, which my Google translation engine, recognizing it as Dutch, translates as “The Train of Indolence”.
In the film, a conflict is being played out between Mathias (Yves Montand), a Flemish linguist and literature professor, and a theatrical stage designer named Anne (Anouk Aimée) who left France to live with him in Belgium and feels both excluded and scorned by the Flemish members of Mathias’ circle.Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 14, 2011). — J.R.
It’s a fairly safe bet that “List-o-mania,” first published in June 25, 1998, was the most popular piece I published in the Reader during my 20 years there as film reviewer, roughly halfway through my stint there. I suspect its appeal had a lot to do with the growing popularity of movie lists ever since the video market started expanding the choices of most viewers.
Like a commercially successful Hollywood feature, “List-o-mania” had its share of sequels and spinoffs. Retitled “The AFI’s Contribution to Movie Hell,” it became a chapter in my most popular book, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), a rant that received over a hundred reviews despite the fact that its small Chicago publisher (a cappella books, a division of Chicago Review Press) couldn’t afford much advertising, aside from freebies in the Reader, and I never even met my publicist there.
In the book, I added in a footnote a list of 25 titles in the AFI’s list that I probably would have included if I’d started my own list from scratch. Then, as an appendix to my 2004 collection Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Johns Hopkins University Press), I compiled a chronological list of my 1000 favorite films, with asterisks next to my 100 crème de la crème, this time including shorts as well as features and non-American as well as American items—a list to which I added 60 more titles in my Afterword to the 2008 paperback. Read more
This film review appeared in The Soho News‘ November 12, 1980 issue. Agee (the writer) has long since then gone up again, considerably, in my estimation of his work. (Alas, the very pricey collection The Complete Film Criticism of James Agee, edited by Charles Maland, made it go down again.)
Ross Spears’ documentary about Agee, which was later nominated for an Oscar, can be ordered now on DVD, along with An Afternoon with Father Flye, from this site. —J.R.
Agee
A film by Ross Spears
Bleecker Street Cinema (The James Agee Room),
Nov. 14-16 and 21-23
When I first saw this feature-length documentary (which is now officially inaugurating the Bleecker Street Cinema’s small, additional screening room) a year or so back, I was pleasantly surprised to find Jimmy Carter — on the campaign trail for the Presidency in ’76 –- making a guest appearance. In the opening moments of the film, he speaks with real intelligence and sensitivity about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men –- an angry, experimental, unclassifiable work of reportage, poetry and analysis about three Alabama tenant families near the height of the Depression, with photographs by Walker Evans and text by James Agee. Read more
“Megalopolis” poster. Photo courtesy: Festival De Cannes Press Kit
The best and worst to be said about Francis Ford Coppola is that he’s a compulsive reviser of his own self-portraits — not only when it comes to rereleasing new versions of his Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The Cotton Club, but even when it comes to his dropping and then reintroducing the ‘Ford’ in Francis Ford Coppola.
Part of what’s both fascinating and frustrating about his most ambitious and audacious film, developed over more than four decades, is the degree to which it revels in its own revisions — provocatively superimposing what looks like later drafts over earlier ones rather than using them as replacements. Far from emerging sadder but wiser, Megalopolis lands in our laps both happier and dumber for its lack of inhibitions. It becomes conventionally digestible only when it occasionally turns into an old-fashioned love story.
The conceit of imagining New York in terms of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (an attempted coup d’état to overthrow the Roman consuls with a populist revolt) entails not only a collapse of today, tomorrow, and yesterday, but alternate versions of all three, ergo a city reinvented whenever there’s a new scene to unravel. Read more
Simon Petri-Lukács conducted the following online interview with me, about 5,000 words long, and requested that I post it here.(I’m sorry that many or most of Simon’s links as given no longer work, but many can be reached via my site’s search engine.) In fact, it’s an extended sequel to the in-person interview that he did with me in the lobby of my hotel in Budapest when I briefly visited that city in February 2022; the photo below shows us there and then, with a couple of friends. I’ll let Simon take over from here. — J.R.
I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum back in February when he visited Budapest. Then, I asked him to be the Jewish Museum’s special Skype-guest later this year and to have a discussion about Elaine May, following her first ever retrospective in Hungary. Because of the pandemic, of course, the retrospective had to be postponed. This interview covers, among other things, the topic of our cancelled Q&A. Furthermore, it offers a broader look at Jonathan’s favorite comedies and his opinions on Jewish stereotypes in American films. It also includes a discussion of his 1997 book, Movies as Politics and the role of literature in his life.
One thing I regretfully forgot last time was to recommend certain works of Jonathan which are available to everyone on this website – except for those periods when he circulates certain articles, but sooner or later they’ll all be there. Read more
My contribution to the 2019 anthology Unwatchable, published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen. — J.R
My refusal to watch Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), even after Criterion generously sent me a review copy, isn’t a position I arrived at suddenly or lightly. Even though the film premiered the year after I retired as a weekly reviewer, thus obviating any possible professional obligation, my decision wasn’t only based on the near-certainty that I would hate it — which, after all, hadn’t prevented me from twitching all the way through The Passion of the Christ five years earlier. Nor was it founded on any conviction that von Trier is devoid of talent, a conviction I don’t have.
Trying retroactively to account for my steadfast refusal to see the film, arrived at eight years ago, I can only take the blatantly ahistorical, illogical, and quintessentially Trieresque tack of citing a remark of his quoted in the Guardian only six months ago. It concerns his latest project (I won’t assist his ad campaign by mentioning the title) — a feature about a serial killer (natch) that takes the serial killer’s viewpoint (ditto). It’s a film, he says, that “celebrates the idea that the life is evil and soulless, which is sadly proven by the recent rise of the Homo trumpus —the rat king.Read more
Published by DVD Beaver in April 2006. I’ve updated this to include further links for films that have subsequently become available; there are in fact quite a few of these, and, unless I’ve missed something, only one title that isn’t currently available, The Argyle Secrets. — J.R.
Most of my favorite offbeat musicals are commercially available on DVD, and I wrote about them for DVDBeaver in March. I can’t say the same about most of my favorite noirs, and I’m not sure why this is so.
It’s also important to stress that “noir” isn’t a genre; it’s a category that’s applied retroactively to films with certain traits in common — a practice started by French critics and eventually continued by us Yanks and others. (Check out James Naremore’s definitive 1998 book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.) This makes it something more flexible than a genre, and I’ve tried to honor this factor in some of my choices.
In the following list I’ve managed to make peace with myself by appending one SBA title (which stands for “should be available”) to each one that you can currently buy, in the same general category, with brief explanations added. Read more
This final chapter in my book Discovering Orson Welles is a lecture delivered in Valencia, Spain, on November 17, 2005, at a conference, “Don Quixote and the Cinema,” held at San Miguel de los Reyes, a convent built during the seventeenth century, making it roughly contemporary with Cervantes’s novel. The same building was used as a prison during the Franco era and functions today as a municipal library, Biblioteca Valenciana.
Given my virtually nonexistent grasp of spoken Spanish, I regretted that the event wasn’t more international; as far as I know, my paper was the only one requiring the services of a translator. The only other non-Spanish participants in the three-day event were a French man and an Italian woman, both of whom seemed to be fluent in the language.
Thanks to the generosity of the conference’s organizer, Carlos F. Heredero (the cowriter of Orson Welles en el País de Don Quijote, cited in my introduction to chapter 15, and an academic scholar and critic whose specialties include Spanish cinema and Wong Kar-wai), I was able to route my trip to Spain through Madrid before the conference and then briefly through Barcelona afterwards. In Madrid I made arrangements to spend three days at the Filmoteca Española looking at the Quixote material mentioned in chapters 19 and 20, but I was severely disappointed to discover that the ten hours I’d arranged to see mainly consisted of material from the TV series Nella Terra di Don Chisiotte and/or bits and pieces of what might be called the wreckage left by Jesus Franco’s disposal of the other footage, not including anything shot in Mexico.Read more
My column in the Winter 2021 issue of CinemaScope. — J.R.
Teaching an online course on Agnès Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-Blu-ray box set, The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, every week. The packaging reminds me in some ways of the handsome 78 rpm albums I used to cherish as objects and totems in the mid- to late 1940s, when I was still a toddler, although Criterion’s version of this sort of assembly, held in a box, manages to be neater and more compact. There’s also a richly illustrated and annotated 200-page book inside the box, with essays by Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, and excellent “program notes” on all the films by Michael Koresky. In short, plenty to keep a coronavirus shut-in busy, even without a course to teach.
The course has gradually brought home to me the complexly ambiguous lesson that Varda wasn’t really or exactly an auteur, at least not in the boys’-club meaning of that term as it’s most commonly used. But not being an auteur gave her a kind of freedom and a form of elasticity denied to most auteurs. Read more
It’s not at all surprising that Abel Ferrara’s most recent feature (1998) has failed to find an American distributor or that some of his most eloquent defenders have labeled this transgressive adaptation of a William Gibson story the collapse of a major talent. A murky and improbable tale about prostitution, industrial espionage, and manufactured viruses, it works on the very edge of coherence even before the final 20 minutes or so, during which earlier portions of the film are replayed with minor variations and additions. On the other hand, few American films in recent years have been so beautifully composed and color coordinated shot by shot, and the overall experience of an opium dream is so intense that you might stop making demands of the narrative once you realize that none of the usual genre expectations is going to be met. Almost all the principal action occurs offscreen, and most of Ferrara and Christ Zois’s script concentrates on scenes between a corporate raider named Fox (Christopher Walken); his deputy, X (Willem Dafoe); and Sandii (Asia Argento, daughter of cult horror director Dario Argento), an Italian prostitute hired to seduce a Japanese scientist. Read more
#1. The bias against sound thinking is so deeply ingrained that it shapes and invades the most casual parts of our speech. Whenever we ask “What movie did you see?”, or discuss film as a visual medium, or refer to viewers or spectators, we participate in a communal agreement to privilege one aspect of a film text by masking another, identifying the part as a whole. Some might argue that this bias is a carryover from the silent era; yet once we acknowledge that silence is as integral to sound as empty space is to image – not so much a neutral terrain as a variable to be defined and/or filled in relation to an infinite variety of contexts – we can’t really claim that the problem started with the “talkies.” Indeed, we can’t even allude to “talkies” without agreeing to privilege speech over silence, sound effects and music, thereby participating in a related form of suppression.
#2. The point is that none of the terms we use are innocent, and the ones we have for discussing sound still aren’t far removed from Neanderthal grunts. Consider the brutal inadequacy of “sound effects”: it would seem barbaric if we spoke of visual composition in Eisenstein or Renoir as “visual effects,” if only because we perceive composition as a complex of interrelated decisions.
The following was written to accompany a film series put together by Ehsan Khoshbakht, Imogen Sara Smith, and myself for a tour in Turkey in late 2018 sponsored by the American Embassy. I don’t know if it was used in this form. — J.R.
“Fake news”, the term paradoxically used by Donald Trump for journalism that exposes his own lies and corruption, evokes what George Orwell called New-speak in 1984, whose slogans included “war is peace” and “ignorance is strength”. Trump’s cleverness as a media manipulator consists of appropriating the very term that describes his own practice while reversing its meaning so that his opponents — including the people who put together this film program about “fake news,” my colleagues and myself — can no longer use it without speaking on Trump’s behalf. This is surely manipulation with a vengeance, where control over both language and presence becomes another form of class inequality. So when TV executives remark that Trump is bad for America but good for television, they’re only suggesting that these two latter entities have separate agendas and even separate owners, neither of which happens to be the American public.
Feeding public fears with worst-case scenarios is the principal form of press manipulation found in Try and Get Me!Read more
From the Chicago Reader (March 17, 2000). I’m delighted that Criterion invited me to retool this review for a new edition of this film in 2020. In some ways, I like Ghost Dog more now than I did 23 years ago. — J.R.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Rating *** A must see
Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch
With Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Frank Minucci, Richard Portnow, Tricia Vessey, Henry Silva, Isaach de Bankolé, and Camille Winbush.
Jim Jarmusch’s seventh narrative feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which I’ve seen three times, may be a failure, if only because most of its characters are never developed far enough beyond their mythic profiles to live independently of them. But if it is, it’s such an exciting, prescient, moving, and noble failure that I wouldn’t care to swap it for even three or four modest successes.
Compared with a masterpiece like its controversial predecessor, the 1995 Dead Man, Ghost Dog seems designed to get Jarmusch out of the art-house ghetto, at least in this country, and into something closer to the mainstream. It’s full of familiar elements reconfigured in unfamiliar ways: Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), whose life was once saved by Louie, a New Jersey hoodlum, becomes Louie’s samurai hit man, communicating with him exclusively with homing pigeons. Read more
The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito discusses pre-Code talkies, noir and leftist politics with one of America’s leading film critics.
DR: We share a common enthusiasm for early talkies. Do you have any favorite actors, writers or storylines relating to the period’s ethnic, often radically left-wing, politics? I’m thinking of the way that, say, The Mayor of Hell suddenly busts into a long Yiddish monologue. Or movies like Counsellor at Law and Street Scene present hard Left ideas through characters with Jewish, Eastern European backgrounds.
JR: Both Counsellor at Law and Street Scene are plays by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that Rice himself adapted, and both are terrific films with very good directors (William Wyler and King Vidor, respectively). It’s too bad that Rice’s plays aren’t revived more often today, although a few years ago, the TimeLine theater company in Chicago put on a fantastic, neo-Wellesian production of The Adding Machine. I also had the privilege of knowing Rice’s two children with actress Betty Field, John and Judy, who attended the same boarding school in Vermont, both of whom I remember quite fondly.
Although it isn’t as politically subversive as the Rice plays, the delightful Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932) is still a more radical comedy in its treatment of class and sex — specifically, the sexual lure of being robbed as another way of being sexually possessed and enjoyed — than Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, released a little later the same year. Read more
